“Your habits reflect your identity, so if you struggle to change a particular habit, re-think your identity.”

Gretchen Rubin

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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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“It’s very hard to stop doing things you’re used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.”

Tom Waits

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“Don’t write when it moves you… Try to make it habitual, even if you just start with 15 minutes a day, two pages a day. Make it such a part of your routine that not doing it makes it a stranger.”

Jennifer Egan

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“I’m married to my calling, but I’m not married to a particular woman. I have no pets. My apartment is full of books and records, the light of Toni Morrison and John Coltrane.”

Cornel West

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“I go for long periods of apparent dormancy, when it looks for all the world like I’m just lying on the couch napping, with an open book placed picturesquely on my chest. But, in fact, things are simmering away. Eventually, I sit up and flip the laptop open and start typing. Then, I write every day for several weeks, mostly in the mornings, after I drop the kids off at school, and then again sometimes late at night after they go to bed. It’s fits and starts.”

Paul Harding

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“It is sometimes necessary to be silent for months before the central image of a book can occur. I do not write every day, I read every day, think every day, work in the garden every day, and recognize in nature the same slow complicity. The same inevitability. The moment will arrive, always it does, it can be predicted but it cannot be demanded. I do not think of this as inspiration. I think of it as readiness. A writer lives in a constant state of readiness. For me, the fragments of the image I seek are stellar; they beguile me, as stars do, I seek to describe them, to interpret them, but I cannot possess them, they are too far away.”

Jeanette Winterson

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“Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work.”

Ernest Hemingway

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“It’s important to me to have a place to work outside of where I live. So I have always found myself an office. I go off to work as if I had a clock to punch; at the end of the day I come home as if I had just gotten off the commuter train. I need to impose a structure on myself.”

Richard Price

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“I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.”

Truman Capote

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“Insult my sexual prowess, my intellect, but not my pancakes.”

Richard Melville Hall

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“The sooner you establish a routine, the more smoothly your collaboration will advance.”

Twyla Tharp

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