"Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing."

From Introduction of the Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

"Sooner or later," V.S. Pritchett wrote in 1941 essay, "the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing." But this is not all completely true with all artists. Every artists had a different routine but a very unique one.

"In that sense, this is a superficial book. It's about the circumstances of creative activity, not the product; it deals with manufacturing rather than meaning. But it's also, inevitably, personal. My underlying concerns in the book are issues that I struggle with in my own life: How do you do meaningful creative work while also earning a living? Is it better to devote yourself wholly to a project or to set aside a small portion of each day? And when there doesn't seem to be enough time for all you hope to accomplish, must you give things up (sleep, income, a clean house), or can you learn to condense activities, to do more in less time, to "work smarter, not harder," as my dad is always telling me? More broadly are comfort and creativity incompatible, or is the opposite true: Is finding a basic level of daily comfort a prerequisite for sustained creative work?"

Below is a selection of random quotes from the book.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

"Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straight forward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers."

William James (1842-1910)

"The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation."

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

"Do you know what moviemaking is?" Bergman asked in a 1964 interview. "Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours there are maybe only ten or twelve minutes, if you're lucky, of real creation. And maybe they don't come. Then you have to gear yourself for another eight hours and pray you're going to get your good ten minutes this time."

John Adams (b. 1947)

"My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits," Adams said in a recent interview. "Because creativity, particularity the kind of work I do - which is writing large-scale pieces, either symphonic music or opera music -s is just, it's very labor-intensive. And it's something that you can't do with an assistant. You have to do it all by yourself."

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

"I wish I had a routine for writing," Miller told an interviewer in 1999. "I get up in the morning and I go out to my studio and I write. And then I tear it up! That's the routine, really. Then, occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm."