Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

I could not have lived in Bohemia or lived the life of a renegade or a pariah, but I think my works have been nonetheless revolutionary in their own way and certainly anti-establishment. I have had in my little study in Connecticut all these years that famous line from Flaubert tacked to my wall: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a Bourgeoi

As a result, Darwin maintained a quiet, monkish life at Down House, with his day structured around a few concentrated bursts of work, broken up by set periods of walking, napping, reading, and letter writing.

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.

The Danish philosopher’s day was dominated by two pursuits: writing and walking. Typically, he wrote in the morning, set off on a long walk through Copenhagen at noon, and then returned to his writing for the rest of the day and into the evening.

In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein confirmed that she had never been able to write much more than half an hour a day—but added, “If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year. To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day.” Stein

Throughout the 1930s, Jung used Bollingen Tower as a retreat from city life, where he led a workaholic’s existence, seeing patients for eight or nine hours a day and delivering

I brood, thinking of ideas, in the automobile when I’m driving to work or in the subway or when I’m mowing the lawn. By the time I get to the paper something’s there—I can produce.

Picasso wanted a lifestyle which would permit him to work in peace without material worries—‘like a pauper,’ he used to say, ‘but with