[Patricia Highsmith] eventually housed three hundred snails in her garden in Suffolk, England, and once arrived at a London cocktail party carrying a gigantic handbag that contained a head of lettuce and a hundred snails—her companions for the evening, she said. When she later moved to France, Highsmith had to get around the prohibition against bringing live snails into the country. So she smuggled them in, making multiple trips across the border with six to ten of the creatures hidden under each breast.

Just one of the many nuggets this book offers. Flaubert would sit in bed for hours upon waking late, ringing a bell to indicate to his mother he was ready for her company. Glenn Gould would talk to folks on the phone for so long they sometimes fell asleep without him noticing. William H. Gass spent a couple hours most mornings wandering around taking photos of waste and filth in the environs, a habit he didn’t think unusual.

While there are many milquetoast entries, the refrain of rising early and writing until lunch becomes almost like the enduring hum of a singing bowl. It becomes like a mantra that encourages you to aspire toward the same productivity. I find reading the routines of artists inspiring for some reason. It’s the same inspiration you see just by being near a bookshelf or creating a list of books to be read, without actually reading a word of the books.

This is an especially encouraging book if you ever feel you’re too late to start or not predisposed to writing because of downturns, blockages, advanced age, etc. In these entries you’ll find folks who didn’t start writing until they were over 40 (Umberto Eco, for example), who actually spent most of their days puttering around until something struck them, who didn’t get up until 1pm and wrote sparsely but enough, who suffered both deleterious and (self-proclaimed) productive alcoholism, who wrote while raising multiple children as employed parents, who wrote anywhere between a sentence and two thousand words a day.

You can find an example of precisely the trait or state of affairs you believe prevents you from writing that novel. I would highly recommend to anyone suffering writer’s block.