Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

“Stories are best written in either one jump or three, according to the length,” he once explained. “The three-jump story should be done in three successive days, then a day or so for revise and off she goes.”

“Inspiration is for amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

“My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits,”

But there’s something to just the excitement of coming up with a slightly different routine.

“As soon as I am awake, I remember my duty, and like a brisk mariner I give the lash to indolence and bounce up with as much vivacity as if a pretty girl, amorous and willing, were waiting for me,”

Character, for Kant, is a rationally chosen way of organizing one’s life, based on years of varied experience—indeed, he believed that one does not really develop a character until age forty.

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

James started a new book the instant the old one was finished.

he always made sure to stop writing when he knew what would come next, making it easier to begin the next day

I think most writers would be very happy with two hours of concentrated work.”

“Be regular and orderly in your life like a Bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one’s life.

“When I think of death,” she once said, “I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore.”

“When it all comes together, a creative life has the nourishing power we normally associate with food, love, and faith.”

King writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and he almost never lets himself quit before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words.

“I simply get up in the morning and go to work, and I read at night,” he wrote. “Like Abe Lincoln.”