Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

  —“A man of immense creativity and endless ideas, Balzac was yet a creature of habit; indeed, a fixed routine was a large part of his success. He isolated himself from the world so that he could concentrate on his writing. He did this in two ways: first, by staying in his home with the blinds drawn,§- and second, by working at night while the world slept. Unless you distance yourself from the ceaseless distractions of the everyday world, like most successful writers (Conrad locked himself into a room, Salinger wrote in a concrete bunker, Fleming completed all the Bond novels in a Jamaican hideaway), unless you take steps to isolate yourself from the madding crowd, distractions are liable to make sustained work impossible. But perhaps even more than isolation, Balzac’s secret was coffee. His procedure was to keep himself alert during the wee hours of the night with murderously black and concentrated and above all thick-brewed coffee, which he made in a big coffeepot and sipped while he worked. He was so fond of coffee that he devoted a chapter to it in a scientific treatise on modern stimulants, singing its praises in glowing terms “[C]offee is a great power in my life,” he confessed. “I have observed its effects on an epic scale.” It kept him awake at night and enabled him to write. It stimulated his creative powers. It allowed him to marshal his thoughts. It gave him so many ideas he could barely keep up with them and his fingers flew across the pages, writing novel after novel at breakneck speed.”—

  —“A man of immense creativity and endless ideas, Balzac was yet a creature of habit; indeed, a fixed routine was a large part of his success. He isolated himself from the world so that he could concentrate on his writing. He did this in two ways: first, by staying in his home with the blinds drawn,§- and second, by working at night while the world slept. Unless you distance yourself from the ceaseless distractions of the everyday world, like most successful writers (Conrad locked himself into a room, Salinger wrote in a concrete bunker, Fleming completed all the Bond novels in a Jamaican hideaway), unless you take steps to isolate yourself from the madding crowd, distractions are liable to make sustained work impossible. But perhaps even more than isolation, Balzac’s secret was coffee. His procedure was to keep himself alert during the wee hours of the night with murderously black and concentrated and above all thick-brewed coffee, which he made in a big coffeepot and sipped while he worked. He was so fond of coffee that he devoted a chapter to it in a scientific treatise on modern stimulants, singing its praises in glowing terms “[C]offee is a great power in my life,” he confessed. “I have observed its effects on an epic scale.” It kept him awake at night and enabled him to write. It stimulated his creative powers. It allowed him to marshal his thoughts. It gave him so many ideas he could barely keep up with them and his fingers flew across the pages, writing novel after novel at breakneck speed.”—