Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

(Theirs was an intellectual partnership with a somewhat creepy sexual component; according to a pact proposed by Sartre at the outset of their relationship, both partners could take other lovers, but they were required to tell each other everything.)

“My readers would welcome whatever life style I chose, as long as I made sure each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldn’t that be my duty—and my top priority—as a novelist?”

“Its purpose was to satisfy without tempting the appetite or causing any sensation of heaviness,” wrote Alma, to whom it seemed “an invalid’s diet.”

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 o

“I keep to this routine every day without variation,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

no receptions, no bourgeois values. We completely avoided all that. There was the presence only of essentials. It was an uncluttered kind of life, a simplicity deliberately constructed so that she could do her work.

he would read and reread classic cookbooks to relax himself before bed.

he was beginning to find that the office routines of Henry Yorke were useful, even essential, to the imaginative work of Henry Green. He feared his own volatility and often referred to his need for habitual routines to keep him sane. The job gave him day-to-day stability as well as experiences that he could use in his writing.

Mencken’s routine was simple: work for twelve or fourteen hours a day, every day, and in the late evening, enjoy a drink and conversation. This was his lifestyle as a young bachelor—when he belonged to a drinking club and often met his fellow members at a saloon after work—and it hardly changed when he got married, at age fifty, to a fellow writer.