"If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space"
About this Quote
Silence becomes a room the writer carries everywhere: a portable studio built out of attention. Behind that inner wall, life’s noise softens, and perception sharpens. The car’s hum, the rhythm of footsteps, the clatter of dishes, these are not interruptions but textures that feed the private work. Writing is no longer confined to the desk; it is an ongoing state of receptivity and composition. Sentences incubate while the hands are busy. Associations flare and fade. The mind rehearses voices, rearranges memories, hears a cadence and follows it to its source.
The wall of silence isn’t about withdrawal from the world so much as a recalibration of engagement. It filters distraction without shutting out reality; it turns the ordinary into material. To live behind it is to cultivate a double-awareness: one self performs the task at hand while another listens for meaning. That listening is both discipline and refuge. It requires choosing solitude in the midst of activity, claiming a mental commons that cannot be easily trespassed upon. From that space, the writer protects the fragile beginnings of thought, the half-formed insight that would be smudged by premature exposure.
There is a paradox at work: the more steadfast the silence, the more alive language becomes. By stepping back, the writer steps closer to what things are, and to the subtle logic by which images join. Habitual living, driving, walking, cleaning, gives the mind the low, steady burn it needs to find structure and tone. The world continues, yet within it runs a current of composition, steady and invisible. Such a stance asks for patience, trust in the slow accrual of the unwritten. It also asks for boundaries, the courage to defend that inward room against urgency and chatter. The reward is continuity: a sense that writing is not an activity added to life but a way of being within it.