I'm certainly fortunate to have the friends that I do and I cherish the time we get to spend together. But some writers are solitary people, even if they're hacks, and need absence from the outside world to create. Because when they have this absence they can be all the people they never get to be in the real world, briefly shutting out the condemnation, cowards writing heroic verse, Paris shaking hands with Achilles. The silence gives them a chance to reign in the multiple points of view, impressions, perceptions and deliver something oddly uniform, in some way or another, their tortured souls rendering something human.

I'm hoping most writers frown upon this kind of maudlin tripe.