Kaustab Choudhury’s Reviews > Daily Rituals: How Artists Work > Status Update

Day 77: David Lynch. "For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee—with lots of sugar. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas!" Lynch’s other means of getting ideas is through Transcendental Meditation: “I have never missed a meditation in thirty three years.”

Day 76: Woody Allen. "I’ve found over the years that any momentary change stimulates a fresh burst of mental energy. So if I’m in this room and then I go into the other room, it helps me. If I go outside to the street, it’s a huge help. If I go up and take a shower it’s a big help. So I sometimes take extra showers... It breaks up everything and relaxes me."

Day 75: Umberto Eco. He once told an interviewer: “This morning you rang, but then you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this new piece I’m writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too.”

Day 74: Martin Amis. Unlike his father, Martin Amis does not approach his writing with a feeling of dread: “I seldom have that kind of squeamishness”.

Day 73: Kingsley Amis. "Do you have a daily routine?"

"Yes. I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter."

Day 72: Wallace Stevens. “I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me. It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life."

Day 71: WB Yeats. “I am a very slow writer. I have never done more than five or six good lines in a day.” So, a lyric poem of eighty or more lines took Yeats about three months of hard labor. Fortunately, Yeats was not so careful about his other writing, like the literary criticism he did to earn extra money. “One has to give something of one’s self to the devil that one may live,” he said. “I give my criticism.”

Day 70: Louis Armstrong. “It’s been hard goddam work, man. Feel like I spent 20,000 years on planes and railroads, like I blowed my chops off.… I never tried to prove nothing, just always wanted to give a good show. My life has been my music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public.”

Day 69: John Cheever. “I must convince myself that writing is not, for a man of my disposition, a self-destructive vocation,” he wrote in his journal in 1968. “I hope and think it is not, but I am not genuinely sure.”

Day 68: Sylvia Plath. She wrote to her mother in October 1962, four months before she would take her own life, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” The darkness and ache in her poetry is felt. It functions like a dagger through one's heart, especially the self-reports of her mood from the times just before she took her life.