Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing.

Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.

If they aren't real enough to surprise me, then they aren't real enough to go on the page.

I ride horseback - arthritic knees permitting - or listen to opera. Sometimes I cook. I used to do needlework, but it's hard on my hands now, so I only do it occasionally, but I like it. And, of course, I read.

I'm not a good collaborator in general.

I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript.

Isn't that an odd philosophy for a vampire?

Common folk didn't have last names in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Very few editors worry about heresy - their goals are much too commercial, thank goodness.

Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing.

I think it is probably more important to attend specialized conventions for a journeyman writer than any other, but it's useful at all stages of a career, if for nothing else, to find out how the industry is working at any given time.

When you're a mid-list writer, it pays to write fast.

You're going through the horror of it, you're going through the isolation of it but you're being empowered by reminding yourself that you're connected to everybody else.

Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.

There's a real purity in New Zealand that doesn't exist in the states. It's actually not an easy thing to find in our world anymore. It's a unique place because it is so far away from the rest of the world. There is a sense of isolation and also being protected.

I rent houses in LA when I'm filming. I find the isolation there terrifying. There's nowhere to go, there's nowhere to be with people. I'm not a beach bunny.

My habit of glorifying things far away in space and time, also contributed to my social isolation.

There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.

Isolation is a dream killer.

Isolation is a self-defeating dream.

Earth's dispossessed are vulnerable targets for extremists: those who teach that global justice is meaningless; that satisfaction can come only in violence, division, and intellectual isolation.

The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.

Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.

The geographical isolation and lack of television made world happenings and problems seem remote.

People can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain.

There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.

And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

National isolation breeds national neurosis.

I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.

Too much of what is called "education" is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.

One could not have isolated this retrovirus without knowledge of other retroviruses, that's obvious. But I believe we have answered the criteria of isolation.

It's funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can't even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of.

The only place I've felt was really my home is my cabin up north. There's something in the water there that connects me to that place. There's also this sense of isolation and loneliness about it that I've never been able to shake.

If a man were living in isolation his income would be literally his product. Make him the monarch and owner of an island, and the fruits that he raises and the clothing that he makes constitute, in themselves, his income. This ceases to be true when trading begins.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation form their purposes.

Teamwork is better than isolation, especially for a columnist.

So if North Korea continues present isolation, then with such economic difficulties the North Korean government must meet a very serious situation in the future.

I cite these events because I think they underline two very disturbing phenomena - the loss of U.S. international credibility, the growing U.S. international isolation.

Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing.

You know, that single girl life and that sense of isolation - that doesn't leave you just like that. And that's what that song is about. I remember that, and that is imprinted on me, that sense.

In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.

If you want to end your isolation, you must be honest about what you want at a core level and decide to go after it.