“That’s why painters live so long,” he said. “While I work I leave my body outside the door, the way Moslems take off their shoes before entering the mosque.”

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.

I always began my task by reading the work of the day before, an operation which would take me half an hour, and which consisted chiefly in weighing with my ear the sound of the words and phrases.…

“A modern stoic,” he observed, “knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.”

“Very often, when an assignment is difficult, he can’t fall asleep until the artistic problem is solved, or he dreams about various ways of designing his drawing,” she wrote in 1999. “Now that’s what I call a hard worker! Even his subconscious doesn’t give him any time off. The next morning, holding onto that dream, he rises at first light and race

The Russian-born novelist’s writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since, Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire novel in complete form before he began writing it, this method allowed him to compose passages out of sequence, in whatever o

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

These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!”

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