October 03, 2014

Colm Tóibín on his daily routine and the cult of Law School


Colm Tóibín's explained his daily routine to the Irish Times: 

"Breakfast? No! None of that eating rubbish. You get down with an empty stomach. So you create this system of rewards – if you do this, you can have that. Otherwise you’d never get any work done… I take an hour off and work for an hour. And I work until late, six days a week. The other general rule is, no lunch with anybody. That’s an awful waste of time. And I would never drink in the day. Ever."
Colm Tóibín also spoke about The Cult of Law School. He said to the Irish Times:
"I have some of the smartest people in the world reading the same book as I’m reading. All I want to do is try and encourage them maybe not to go to law school. Because they’re so smart, that’s where everyone thinks they should go."
Read my previous post here where Christopher Hitchens speaks on how to succeed. Christopher Hitchens also spoke here about his daily routine:
"A typical writing day for me depends on how atypical the previous day was. In that I tend to work late at night and if it's been successful, I may not have gone to bed till three. So the next writing day will probably not start until say noon. But if you absolutely had to average a day, it would be like this: Get up, try and inhale some coffee, forcing myself to eat oatmeal for cholesterol purposes... before lunchtime I wouldn't get much done except answering emails and fending off whatever had accumulated. The world of "telegrams and anger" as E.M. Foster puts it, just coping with that and then having lunch which I usually do reading by myself; because I think the essential thing for being a writer is being a good reader. The main thing as I keep saying, I never tire of saying is, to keep testing yourself against other writers who are better than you. That's what qualifies one as a writer I think, permanently running the risk of having to say I don't know why I bother. I think there are certain authors of whom one should have all their books, even if you can go and borrow them from the library. So I know I have in this apartment every single word that George Orwell ever wrote, including his expenses reports to the BBC. Most of Marcel Proust. Most of James Joyce... I like to think that I have a life, rather than a job or a career."
Hunter S. Thompson daily routine here:
Philip Larkin explained his daily routine to the Paris Review:
"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."
John Waters on his routine here. John Updike on his here. Here for Charles Bukowski and his routine.

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