There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

I could be imagining it, but I believe myself to have exchanged sly, understanding nods with other people I see attending movies alone on Christmas Day.

People think it's terribly sad to spend Christmas alone, but it's no sadder, really, than spending any other day alone, is it?

The sight of people sleeping on the streets hits us hardest around Christmas and New Year. We see them camped out alone on the freezing concrete, and we think, with a rush of guilt, about heading home to our families and our soft beds.

Christmas lights may be the loneliest thing for me, especially if you mix them up with reindeers and sleighs. I feel alone. I feel isolated. I feel I do not belong.

'The Christmas Song,' by Nat King Cole, is not only a masterful performance; to me it just sounds like the holidays. I've never sung it, because Nat's version is so perfect. I gotta leave it alone.

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.

I think we need one recognized, respected public figure to make a tough, blunt statement on just what Reagan's record is and what he might do to the country, let alone the Republican Party before Christmas.

Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness.

Change alone is unchanging.

A complaint is a chance to turn a customer into a lifelong friend. I say that seriously, not as some press release baloney.

There is no health without mental health; mental health is too important to be left to the professionals alone, and mental health is everyone's business.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this - nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously 'creative'.

Feeling alone makes negative feelings worse. When you feel alone, frustration quickly can become anger, fear quickly can become panic.

I restore myself when I'm alone. A career is born in public - talent in privacy.

Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn't be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead

"When I walk into [the studio] I am alone, but I am alone with my

If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.