Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised me was there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, and that I came out and met other people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not so rare as some people think, but purpose or vocation which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of other that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone. ~ Rebecca Solnit from Literary Hub: Rebecca Solnit on a Childhood of Libraries and Wandering