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The Writing Life - Quirks and Idiosyncrasies


  • William Faulkner loved the early 1960s TV program Car 54, Where are You? Having no TV of his own, each Sunday night he watched it at a neighbor’s home.
  • Gustave Flaubert kept his lover’s slippers and mittens in his desk drawer.
  • Alexandre Dumas, the elder, ate an apple at 7 a.m. each morning under the Arc de Triomphe.
  • Bjarati Mukherjee will not leave the house if someone sneezes just as she’s getting ready to leave and she doesn’t cut her nails on certain days of the week.
  • Anne Rivers Siddons’ husband reports that she makes a nest of papers, like a mouse getting ready for winter, then she starts walking into walls just before she begins a new novel.
  • Stephen King goes through these motions when he sits down to write; “I have a glass of water or I have a cup of tea. I have my vitamin pill I have my music; I have my same seat; and the papers are all arranged in the same places.”
  • Acquaintances recall James Russell Lowell removing and proceeding to eat with knife and fork a bouquet of flowers from the centerpiece at a literary supper in one of Boston’s great houses.
  • Gertrude Stein scribbled her poems on odd scraps of paper in her Ford, “Godiva,” parked at the curb. She had discovered her lofty position in the driver’s seat was an inspiring spot in which to write.
  • It is alleged that Henry David Thoreau could swallow his nose. He also talked with forest animals. “I talked to [the woodchuck] in quasi forest lingo, baby talk, at any rate in a conciliatory tone, and thought that I had some influence on him.”
  • As a child Louisa May Alcott wrote passionate letters to Ralph Waldo Emerson but she never sent them. She sat in the tall walnut tree in front of his house at midnight singing to the moon.
  • Charles Dickens walked twenty to thirty miles a day. He also placed objects on his desk in exactly the same position, always set his bed in north/south directions, and touched certain objects three times for luck.
  • Hans Christian Andersen put a sign next to his bed that read “I am not really dead.”
  • Saint-Pol-Roux hung the inscription “The Poet Is Working” from his door while he slept.
  • Emily Dickinson wouldn’t see her dressmaker, go out of the house, or expose her handwriting. Her sister addressed all her letters.
  • Five years after Nightwood was published, Djuna Barnes left Paris, gave up smoking and drinking, refused interviews and photographs, and removed all the mirrors from her apartment.
  • Shirley Jackson owned more than 500 books on witchcraft.
  • At his funeral, Langston Hughes had arranged for a jazz trio to play “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me.”

    And a few citing of sartorial eccentricities:

  • Edgar Allen Poe always wore black;
  • Emily Dickinson only white;
  • Mark Twain also attired himself in white, with shirts he personally designed that buttoned down the back.
  • Carl Sandburg sported a green eyeshade when he worked, and
  • E. B. White tied on a surgical mask in public to protect himself from contagious diseases.
  • John Cheever donned his only suit of clothes when he went to his studio in the morning. He hung it up while he worked in his underwear, then dressed and returned home.
  • Allan Gurganus said he wears a moving man’s zip-up uniform because “I perspire so freely that I sweat my way through the fiction.”
  • Forest McDonald is said to write history on his rural Alabama porch - naked.















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