Daily Routines

Karl Lagerfeld

He spends most of his time in a thousand-square-foot room, at the center of which sat a modern fourposter bed. The posts were made of fluorescent bulbs, and a sable bedspread was strewn with paperbacks and magazines and more iPods. Lagerfeld says that he sleeps seven hours a night in this bed; he also spends considerable time lounging on it during his waking hours, reading and drawing. There was a large desk a few feet away, piled with papers, sketchbooks, magazines, books, newspapers, and art supplies. Lagerfeld complains that his desk kept getting “buried.” To deal with the problem, he recently bought four more desks. They got buried, too. A Mac G5 computer was visible among the messy stacks of books and papers on a long table at the foot of his bed, but Lagerfeld insists that he rarely uses it and does not surf the Internet—partly because he is fearful of how it might compromise his privacy. “I don’t want to be on the Internet,” he said. “I hardly use a credit card—everything where you can be fixed. I’m floating. Nobody can catch me, mmm?”

The New Yorker, March 19, 2007

Kingsley Amis

INTERVIEWER
Do you have a daily routine?

AMIS
Yes. I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter. That’s probably about ten-thirty, still in pajamas and dressing gown. And the agreement I have with myself is that I can stop whenever I like and go and shave and so on. In practice, it’s not till about one or one-fifteen that I do that—I usually try and time it with some music on the radio. Then I emerge, and nicotine and alcohol are produced. I work on until about two or two-fifteen, have lunch, then if there’s urgency about, I have to write in the afternoon, which I really hate doing—I really dislike afternoons, whatever’s happening. But then the agreement is that it doesn’t matter how little gets done in the afternoon. And later on, with luck, a cup of tea turns up, and then it’s only a question of drinking more cups of tea until the bar opens at six o’clock and one can get into second gear. I go on until about eight-thirty and I always hate stopping. It’s not a question of being carried away by one’s creative afflatus, but saying, “Oh dear, next time I do this I shall be feeling tense again.”

The Paris Review, Winter 1975

Thomas Hardy

At twenty-one, Hardy went up to London to advance his architectural career, and it was around this time that he began the incredible labor--with no training, no encouragement, and no guide--of willing himself into existence as a poet. He worked from six to midnight every evening. He bought copies of Milton, Thomson, and Coleridge, an Introduction to English Literature, a Standard Pronouncing Dictionary (which says a lot about where he came from and how he felt about it), and a Rhyming Dictionary. He bought notebooks and filled them with vocabulary-building exercises, imitations, coinages, memoranda about specific literary effects, and pages and pages of quotations. He started jotting down notes about what he was seeing, reading, feeling, overhearing--ideas and images and phrases on which he would draw throughout his life. He also started writing poems such as this one, which gives a fair sample not only of his presumptive feelings at the time, but of the sardonic wit that would characterize much of his later verse:

A senseless school, where we must give
Our lives that we may learn to live!
A dolt is he who memorizes
Lessons that leave no time for prizes.

What he was not doing was publishing any of those poems, and by the time Hardy turned twenty-six he had given up on his dream of a university education followed by a lifetime of idle hours in the rectory--the recognition that probably precipitated the foregoing epigram. The next year he took ill, and when his old Dorchester boss wrote to offer him a job, he came back from London, after five years, with his tail between his legs. He had few prospects, little money, and virtually no connections in the literary world. But he did have one thing: the beginnings of a novel.

The New Republic, February 19, 2007

Benjamin Franklin

The precept of Order requiring that every part of my business should have its allotted time, one page in my little book contained the following scheme of employment for the twenty-four hours of a natural day.

 

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Edmund Wilson

Thanks to Wilson's meticulous, posthumously published diaries, in which he seems to have recorded his every sexual episode in harshly clinical detail (he appears at times to have bedded women solely for the purpose of recording the experiences), we already know far too much about his routine, which could be summarized as Stakhanovite reading, followed by concentrated writing, followed by boozy seduction, followed by kind of yucky sex.

The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2005

Elmore Leonard

AMIS: What is your routine and how do you go about it?

LEONARD: I write every day when I'm writing, some Saturdays and Sundays, a few hours each day. Because I want to stay with it. If a day goes by and you haven't done anything, or a couple of days, it's difficult to get back into the rhythm of it. I usually start working around 9:30 and I work until 6. I'm lucky to get what I consider four clean pages. They're clean until the next day, the next morning. The time flies by. I can't believe it. When I look at the clock and it's 3 o'clock and I think, "Good, I've got three more hours." And then I think, "I must have the best job in the world." I don't look at this as work. I don't look at it as any kind of test, any kind of proof of what I can do. I have a good time.

AMIS: And it just seems to flow? There are no days when whole hours are spent gazing out of the window, picking your nose, making coffee?

LEONARD: Oh yeah, there are whole hours' work to make one short paragraph work.

Martin Amis Interviews Elmore Leonard

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Morning routine
SCOTT BROWN: I get up at 5 a.m. and call my mother's caregivers. Then we have breakfast.
VENTURI: I get up almost that early, to look at the TV and get dressed. And I take a lot of notes in the middle of the night, so I get those organized.

Evening routine
VENTURI: We get home at around 6:30 p.m., put on British sitcoms, BBC News and then I do a crossword puzzle.

The New York Times Magazine, May 18, 2003

William Grimes

The alarm goes off at 3 a.m., as usual. Soda, one of our two cats, starts by rubbing her paws rapidly against the side of the bed. When that fails, she presses the pads of her front paws into the little openings in the caning of the headboard. By pushing and pulling, she turns it into a kind of percussion instrument. If that doesn't work, she beats me on the face with a paw. At that point, she's furious.

I get up and feed her. Then, at 7 a.m., I get up again and attend to the six cats in the backyard. These are strays that my wife and I inherited when a cat-loving neighbor moved and the free lunch came to an end for a roving colony of felines. Many thousands of dollars in vet bills later, Nancy and I have created a cat paradise in the backyard, complete with a big plastic igloo and an insulated dog cottage.

The now-neutered cats assemble at the backdoor around 6:45 a.m. My appearance triggers mass jubilation. I feed them, then return in my role as social director, giving them a half-hour workout with a kind of fishing pole to which Nancy attached two little red pompoms. The bouncing balls send them into a frenzy, and if all six cats get going at once, kitty gridlock can result. After a good session of wind sprints, they settle down, and I can start my day.

The holidays have played havoc with my schedule. Normally I do most of my writing on Friday, but this week I start Monday like most other people, with a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. I have never experienced writer's block. I write quickly. I've never been stuck for a lead. But I still experience the queasy feeling that most writers know all too well when faced with a blank piece of paper. The night before I have to write, I feel anxious and peevish. I can't really concentrate. This only gets worse with time. I read somewhere that neuroses only intensify with age, in the same way that nuts tend to tighten on a car wheel as its spins. It's true.

Slate, December 18, 2001

Joyce Carol Oates

What is your writing routine?

I try to write in the morning very intensely, from 8:30 to 1 p.m. When I'm traveling, I can work from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. Alone, I don't sleep that well. I get a lot of work done in hotel rooms. The one solace for loneliness is work. I hand write and then I type. I don't have a word processor. I write slowly.

Are you able to read when you are writing?

I read in the evening usually. I just got back from Europe, I was reading Jane Austen on the plane. I might just be reading anything ... I never waste time. I don't watch much television. To me, wasting time isn't in my nature. I find it difficult to understand why people would people deliberately waste their time.

Do you ever do summer beach reading?

I'd rather take poison, I'd rather chew ground glass.

USA Weekend, July 29, 2001

Gary Panter

Get up at 7:30 in the morning -- feed cats, drive daughter to school, read the NY Times and drink chocolate milk. Do chores and tasks and try to get time to make art. Make art. Take naps. Before each 5 minute nap I read a page or two. Right now I'm reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. Make art. Go to sleep at 3:00 in the morning.

Readersvoice.com, March 2007

Peter Eisenman

Morning routine: I get up around 5:30 or 6. I read. My best time to think and read is between 5:30 and 7. I take a shower at 7 and make my son's breakfast at 7:15. Then I walk my younger son to school and get to work by 8.

The New York Times Magazine, May 18, 2003

Philip Larkin

INTERVIEWER
What is your daily routine?

LARKIN
My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time—some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next. Or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

INTERVIEWER
You didn’t mention a schedule for writing . . .

LARKIN
Yes, I was afraid you’d ask about writing. Anything I say about writing poems is bound to be retrospective, because in fact I’ve written very little since moving into this house, or since High Windows, or since 1974, whichever way you like to put it. But when I did write them, well, it was in the evenings, after work, after washing up. (I’m sorry, you would call this “doing the dishes.”) It was a routine like any other. And really it worked very well, I don’t think you can write a poem for more than two hours. After that you’re going round in circles, and it’s much better to leave it for twenty-four hours, by which time your subconscious or whatever has solved the block and you’re ready to go on.

The best writing conditions I ever had were in Belfast, when I was working at the university there. Another top-floor flat, by the way. I wrote between eight and ten in the evenings, then went to the university bar till eleven, then played cards or talked with friends till one or two. The first part of the evening had the second part to look forward to, and I could enjoy the second part with a clear conscience because I’d done my two hours. I can’t seem to organize that now.

The Paris Review, Summer 1982

Haruki Murakami

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

The Paris Review, Summer 2004

See also: "The Running Novelist," The New Yorker, June 9, 2008

William Wegman

Morning routine: In Maine, I get up around 7:30 or so. First you have to feed four dogs four different things. They all have their diets, their own pills that they're taking. Batty's on all kinds of medication, Rimadyl for arthritis and Pepcid AC and Benadryl.

Workout: Every morning the dogs and I take a bike ride, about five miles uphill. In the afternoon I usually take them on a 20-mile ride. That's why I'm so fit [Laughs].

The New York Times Magazine, September 14, 2003

Daniel Libeskind

Morning routine: I get up anywhere from 6 to 7 a.m. I kiss my daughter and exercise at the house for an hour. Then I have a cup of coffee and listen to classical music. I just sit and listen to music. It sets the day.

How he ends his day: Dinner with the family. We do that late, around 10 o'clock. We always set up the candles, eat, relax and talk about things other than work. My wife, Nina, cooks.

The New York Times Magazine, May 21, 2006