“Someone lent us cottage in Hartsfordshire. I was sitting in a sort of parlor there one day, writing. And suddenly I saw someone run past the window, along the lane outside. With shorts on, white shirt and so on. And it seemed to me such an unusual image . . . that I wrote down at the top of a sheet of paper, ‘the loneliness of the long-distance runner.’ I didn’t know where he had come from, I didn’t know where he was going. He was simply a sort of . . . vision, floating by the window. And I put the line away, I thought I was going to write a poem with this sort of line in it. It seemed rather a nice line.” –Alan Sillitoe, author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

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