Michael Chabon Quotes

When writers say that they need to 'set the mood' or 'get into the zone', those are all ways to procrastinate. Not prerequisites.

The Web forces me to be disciplined and not to waste time - but before the Web was invented, there were plenty of opportunities to do that anyway.

We go to the office every day when we're writing - or supposed to be writing. It's not always productive, and there's a lot of procrastinating, just staring at the wall, like any other writing. But we just make ourselves go to the office every day for more or less the whole day.

The biggest challenge is to stay focused. It's to have the discipline when there are so many competing things.

Everything in life turns out to be a distraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million distractions and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew that the other kids weren't. I was the one able to do the thing, not because I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply weren't applying themselves.

I would never finish a painting if I didn't have a deadline.

I have nothing like a writing routine. I sometimes have trouble buckling down to write at home.

Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and again... Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.

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.

If I leave my computer, I'm probably not going to get back for hours. If I take a few minutes to answer questions and go web surfing, then guilt kicks in and I get back to work.

It's very easy to fool yourself that you're working, you know, when you're really not working very hard. I mean, I'm very lazy. So for me, I would always have an excuse, you know, to go - quit early, go to a museum, you know. So I do everything I can to make myself remember this is a job. I keep a schedule.

I procrastinate all morning. That's when I get my office work done and answer e-mails and see what's on the Internet and do laundry.

The key to getting work done on time is to stop wearing a watch.

I'm a full-time writer, which means I have the entire day to get my work done. But that can also be bad, because that means I have the entire day to get in my way.

I procrastinate so much and I get distracted by anything.

I write slowly and get distracted a lot.

I have a very strict regimen of showing up at my desk at a certain hour with my cup of green tea. It is very quiet. I don't like having a lot of atmosphere around.

I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.

This life is yours and no one else's, and if you spend your time looking at other people's pages, you'll never get anything done.

I think the worst and most insidious procrastination for me is research. I will be looking for some bit of fact or figure to include in the novel, and before I know, I've wasted an entire morning delving into that subject matter without a word written.

I think the lack of precision and deep focus is why it took me years to build up my work.

One of the things I'm really good at is procrastinating.

I have no organisational skills. All my energy goes into worry - worrying takes a lot of energy.

I set a goal for myself everyday when I write - 10 pages a day - and it's much harder because I'm too dumb to turn off my Twitter and everything so it's always on and it's a real distraction. It's a major distraction.

Working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination.