By Mason Currey
“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are” – Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin xv
“The great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute…” – V.S. Pritchett xviii
“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition” – W.H. Auden 3
Ludwig van Beethoven – always carried a pencil and a couple of sheets of music paper in his pocket, to record chance musical thoughts. 18
Benjamin Franklin thought that if you could maintain his devotion to one virtue for an entire week, if would become a habit; then he could move on to the next virtue, successively making fewer and fewer offenses until he had completely reformed himself. 21
Gustave Flaubert – “work is still the best way of escaping from life.” 32
Sigmund Freud – he loved cigars. “My boy, smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you.” 39
Joan Miro – “Merde! I absolutely detest all openings and parties! They’re commercial, political, and everybody talks too much. They get on my tits!” 49
Ernest Hemmingway – Hemingway rose early at 5:30 or 6am. He wrote every morning as soon after first light as possible. 52
Haruki Marakami – “Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” 60
Toni Morrison – Her morning ritual involved waking up at sunrise to watch the sunrise. “Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in the mysterious process. For me light is the signal in the transaction. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there BEFORE it arrives. It enables me in some sense.” 62
Nicholson Baker – “I liked the feeling of getting up really early, The mind is newly cleansed” 69
Margaret Mead – “Empty time stretches forever, I can’t bear it.” 72
T.S. Elliot – took a job at Lloyds bank. Under the guise of a banker he began his literary journey. “the prospect of staying there for the rest of my life is abominable to me” 99
Joseph Cornell – hated working too. During the 1940s he returned to the workforce twice, happy at first to resume the reassuring 9-5 routine. Then, after a period of months, he would grow frustrated and quit. 108
Wallace Stevens – “I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me. It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life. I am just as free as I want to be and of course I have nothing to worry about money.” 115
Woody Allen – Momentary change stimulates a fresh burst of mental energy. “If I go outside on the street it’s a huge help. If I go up and take a shower it’s a big help. Sometimes I take extra showers.” “I think in the cracks all the time, I never stop”. 121
H.L. Mencken – “Looking back over a life of hard work…my only regret is that I didn’t work even harder.” 129
Philip Roth – “Writing isn’t hard work, it’s a nightmare” 144
Franz Liszt – “To live one’s life is hard enough, why write down all the misery?” 156
Honore de Balzac – “I’m not living, I’m wearing myself out in a horrible fashion – but whether I die of work or something else, it’s all the same.” 158
Mark Twain – Whether or not he was working, he smoke cigars constantly. 174
Alexander Graham Bell – “I have my periods of restlessness when my brain is crowded with ideas tingling in my fingertips when I am excited and cannot stop for anybody.” His wife wrote to him in 1888 “I wonder do you think of me in the midst of that work of yours of which I am so proud and yet so jealous, for I know it has stolen from me part of my husband’s heart, for where his thoughts and interests life, there must his heart be.” 176
Stephen King – “And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night – six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight – so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.” 224