“Starting out, I imagined a straightforward book in three parts, moving along a taut narrative path with a sturdy foundation of clay undergirding all. Books have their own fates, however, and research—at least the kind of research that I practice—yields to serendipity. If the destination is known beforehand, what’s the point of the journey? A provisional map of the whole allows the woolgathering pilgrim to get a little lost along the way without losing his bearings completely. Meanwhile, coincidences and chance meetings confirm a certain rightness, a fit, in the meandering quest.”

Christopher Benfey

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“The nature of process, to one degree or another, involves failure. You have at it. It doesn’t work. You keep pushing. It gets better. But it’s not good. It gets worse. You go at it again. Then you desperately stab at it, believing ‘this isn’t going to work.’ And it does!”

Saul Bass

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“I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.”

John Baldessari

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“The best results always come when you’re focusing on nothing but execution and letting the results just happen as they will.”

Tom Lehman

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“It is my considered opinion that one reason you are not writing is that you are allowing yourself to read in the time set aside to write. You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading. And don’t write letters during that time. If you don’t write, don’t do anything else. And get in a room by yourself. If there are two rooms in that house, get in the one where nobody else is…”

Flannery O'Connor

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“I found a new chord the other day. I was like, ‘Shit, if I had known that years ago…’ That’s what’s beautiful about the guitar. You think you know it all, but it keeps opening up new doors. I look at life as six strings and twelve frets. If I can’t figure out everything that’s in there, what chance do I have of figuring out anything else?”

Keith Richards

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“My strip is not like the kind that depends on variety or new characters. I’ve got pretty much the same characters and basic idea that I had so many years ago. I want to keep the strip simple. I like it, for example, when Charlie Brown watches the first leaf of fall float down and then walks over and just says, ‘Did you have a good summer?’ That’s the kind of strip that gives me pleasure to do.”

Charles Schulz

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“The originality which we ask from the artist is originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.”

Oscar Wilde

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“Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.”

Geoff Dyer

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“My office, which has always been more or less the same, is a big undifferentiated room. I sit in one place in the room, in the same relationship to the rest of the room as everybody else. There is no visual hierarchy. I think it may have to do with the fact that when I was a kid my family lived in a three-roomed apartment. The family would spend its evenings in the living room. My mother would knit at one end, my father would read the paper and listen to the radio, my sister was at her desk, and I was at the other end doing my homework. I became accustomed to the lack of privacy and got used to working in a place where a lot of things were going on.”

Milton Glaser

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“Novels take me a long time; short fiction provides a kind of immediate gratification—the relationship of sketches to battle paintings.”

Donald Barthelme

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“[T]he daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists—people who really do get a lot done—very rarely include techniques for ‘getting motivated’ or ‘feeling inspired.’ Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasize the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishing certain physical actions, regardless of mood. Anthony Trollope wrote for three hours each morning before leaving to go to his job as an executive at the post office; if he finished a novel within a three-hour period, he simply moved on to the next. (He wrote forty-seven novels over the course of his life.) The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasize specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.’”

Oliver Burkeman

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“It is toward the end of the second draft, if I’m lucky, when the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show to other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away. The feeling is more than welcome, yes, but it is hardly euphoria. It’s just a new lease on life, a sense that I’m going to survive until the middle of next month. After reading the second draft aloud, and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose things in boxes for Draft No. 4. If I enjoy anything in this process it is Draft No. 4. I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. The final adjustments may be small-scale, but they are large to me, and I love addressing them.”

John McPhee

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“The best research gets your fingers dusty and your shoes dirty, especially because a novel is made of details. I had to translate places through my senses into the senses of my readers. I had to know what a place smelled like, what it sounded like when it rained in Mexico City. There’s no substitute for that. I’ve been steeped in evidence-based truth.”

Barbara Kingsolver

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“If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.”

Kenneth Goldsmith

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