Scott Adams on his morning routine: “I wait for the ideas… like a hunter in a duck blind”
Like many writers, Scott Adams has a pretty strict routine that he follows when getting down to work. He describes it in a Business Insider article, and no
“Two very simple rules, a: you don’t have to write. b: you can’t do anything else.”
Raymond Chandler in a 1949 letter to Alex Barris on the discipline of writing: What do I do with myself from day to day? I write when I
John Le Carré: “I am an absolute monk about my work”
Not long ago I went through a John Le Carré phase. Mainly thanks to the new Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie in which Gary Oldman plays George Smiley, I read the
J. G. Ballard on writing: “Two hours in the late morning, two in the early afternoon… [then] Scotch and soda, and oblivion”
From the Paris Review interview with author J. G. Ballard: INTERVIEWER What are your daily working habits like? BALLARD Every day, five days a week. Longhand now, it’s
“I spend four hours a day bragging to people like you about how busy I am, so you think I’m important”
You know the pushback against the cult of busyness is growing when there’s a Vooza video about it:
Dan Ariely and fighting the “thieves of our time, thieves of our attention, thieves of our productivity”
Business Insider’s Eric Barker has a nice profile of Dan Ariely’s recent work on productivity and time management. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his books,
Stephen King on writing as “creative sleep”
One of the arguments I'm building in the rest project is that for creative people, work and rest are not opposites, but partners. We think of rest as
Ray Bradbury on the muse, and ten years of practice
Of all the writers I know, Ray Bradbury is probably the most eloquent proponent of the idea that inspiration is unbiddable and uncontrollable, that his stories came from
C. S. Lewis
In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis describes his time living in Great Bookham with William Kirkpatrick, a former school headmaster who tutored students preparing for university entrance