As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.

"Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn't make it a living breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

Advice? I don't have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you're writing, you're a writer. Write like you're a Goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there's no chance for a pardon. Write like you're clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you've got just one last thing to say, like you're a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God's sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don't. Who knows, maybe you're one of the lucky ones who doesn't have to.

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.

Support is the number one thing when it comes to fighting a mental illness. And the ones who have walked in the same shoes as you are the very best support system. There is no stigma in this group. There is no judging. We aren't here to judge. We are here to understand and to let you know you aren't alone in whatever battle you are facing. And that is why we started this group called You Matter.

FATHER MEANS THE PILLARS THAT STANDS FIRM IN EVERY STORM WITHOUT SAYING ANYTHING LIKE A SHIELD TO FACE EVERY CRISIS THAT COMES UPON YOUR FAMILY ALONE.

Great people have often said, truth alone triumphs. I am no great but a plain human, so I say, love alone triumphs.

You come to the world alone, you leave alone, in between, you can have a company but choice a devoted companion.

There is no fun in doing something alone.

Your problem is yours alone. For others, it is just information, news, gossip ? or even just a distant happening or event. So, don't expect others to understand your situation better than you do.

There's a difference between loneliness and aloneness. Loneliness is when being alone causes suffering. But aloneness is ultimately recognizing others as yourself, and when you realize that you are one with everything.

We lie about what we really wanted because we don't want to feel rejected - a form of abandonment...But not asking for what we want is worse. Self-abandonment. And when we agree to relationships and situations we don't want because we can't bear to be alone or don't have the courage to ask, we become a victim of that non-asked for thing, grieving for ourselves...You can choose differently.

Remember to remember, you are never alone. The universe is always working to help you.

Live fearless, after all you have to face death alone.

If you're all alone and miserable then you are definitely in a bad company.

Join the mob or go for what you want. Give yourself plenty of quiet time alone in order to get in touch with who you are...Focus power of thought. Remind yourself that the world is yours for the asking. The non-risker does not grow, you just get older. When you have decided which ideas, beliefs, relationships, and situations no longer work for you, it is time to release them. Let go of negative thoughts - view them as a flight of birds crossing your path. See them fly into view and continue on their way.' - from Joan Root's diary

Alone with my wine and my misery, I was convinced that life was composed of a string of "if only's" leading from one self-inflicted bungle to the next until at some point, one's final iteration of the excuse became one's final utterance, and one expired.