Scott Turow Quotes

I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.

I write every day. I don't have a writing schedule. I write when I feel like it. Fortunately, I feel like it all the time. I am writing for hours. I do like to write in the morning. I start after breakfast, like 9 o'clock, and I'll write till lunch, about 1. And after lunch, I just have fun.

I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.

I try to write in the mornings, as soon as I'm up and caffeinated, and to stay in the chair as long as I can be productive.

I write in the mornings once the kids have gone to school, taking my laptop and a coffee to a little writer's room in town where I plant noise-cancelling headphones on my head and get to work.

I don't really get into a writing routine until March or April, when I'll write a few hundred words a day, often in a cafe in the morning after the school run.

I just write from dawn to dusk.

My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out.

Until now, I've been a kind of binge-writer - I'll carve out five or six hours on a weekend day and make a large container of espresso and just bang out a lot of words.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

I write every day.

I often write either really early in the morning, or really late at night.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

When I wake up in the morning, I need the writing to go to. I begin there. And that's not an accident, I mean, that habit of getting up in the morning and going to my writing first thing.

I'm not a person who would get up at 5 A.M. to write, but I could sacrifice my Friday night and just order in dinner, sit at home and get into it.

Every day I write. I am not waiting for a great idea from heaven.

I don't want to blame anybody, but I just want to tell you that the process of writing is antisocial, so on the days that you have something really important to write, go from lying down directly to your notepad or your computer. Do not talk.

During the day, if I don't have any other commitments, I'm usually at my desk writing, revising, or researching anywhere from four to six hours.

Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work.

People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really just want to know what the magic formula is for writing. I inevitably disappoint them by saying you just put your butt in the chair, and you write 500 words a day, and then you get up and repeat it the next morning.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

I write in the morning from about eight till noon, and sometimes again a bit in the afternoon. In the morning I start off by going over what I had done the previous day, which my wife has happily typed up for me.

I write every day... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.

A journalist also needs to be disciplined, and so do I. I am, essentially, lazy. Without discipline I'd be just a mass of gummy bears on the sofa instead of on book tour with my eighth novel.