”Do you understand now why I am never bored? For over fifty years I have not stopped working for an instant. From nine o’clock to noon, first sitting. I have lunch. Then I have a little nap and take up my brushes again at two in the afternoon until the[…]

”I keep a hotel room in which I do my work—a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and sometimes, if I can find it, a face basin. I keep a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry in the room. I try to get[…]

 Maugham often felt impatient to begin again. “When you’re writing, when you’re creating a character, it’s with you constantly, you’re preoccupied with it, it’s alive,” he said—adding that when you “cut that out of your life, it’s a rather lonely life.” From “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find[…]

“I shall always be depressed,” Beckett concluded, “but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me.” From “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and[…]

Like Anthony Trollope, James started a new book the instant the old one was finished. Asked once when he found the time to form the design of a new book, James rolled his eyes, patted the questioner on the knee, and said, “It’s all about, it’s about—it’s in the air—it,[…]

“I don’t believe in draining the reservoir, do you see? I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it, while I still have things to say.” Two or three hours in the morning were enough for him, although he stressed the importance of keeping regular hours in order[…]

“My finest hours were Watergate, Iran-Contra, the impeachment,” Chuck Close says. The constant chatter can be distracting, he admits, but he claims that this is actually a good thing: “I like a certain amount of distraction. It keeps me from being anxious. It keeps things at a little bit more[…]

Put part of your life on autopilot; by forming good habits, William James said, we can “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.” From “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work” by Mason Currey  

“Sooner or later,” Pritchett writes, “the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.” From “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work” by Mason Currey