It's very important to write things down instantly or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.

I tend to start at 9 o'clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours pretty much without any breaks.

I am a morning writer I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty when I go for a swim. Then I come back have lunch and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation until I came to the point when I could not write another word not even the next letter. I went to bed. Eight o'clock the next morning I was up writing again.

Those golden minutes before you are completely awake when your mind is just drifting you have no censorship you are ready to develop any kind of idea. That's when I come up with the best and worst ideas. That is the privilege of being a writer - that you can stay in bed for an hour in the morning and it's work time.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning you throw on your suspenders and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand usually and sing into a tape recorder.

I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening.

I wake up early in the morning and walk for an hour. If I have something to write I prefer to write in the morning until midday and in the afternoon I eat.

I write when I'm inspired and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.