http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/the-fierce-imagination-of-haruki-murakami.html?pagewanted=all
by Sam Anderson, Oct 21, 2011, The New York Times.
“Full time,” for Murakami, means something different from what it does for most people. For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — “but voluntary confinement, happy confinement.”
“Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life,” he said. “If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don’t get bored. I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.
I've never read the work of Murakami, but the journalist's description struck me as very similar to the way author JM Coetzee, who I would recommend to any reader, was described in 1999. . .
The New Statesman Profile - J M Coetzee
The ideal chronicler of the new South Africa, he deserves to make literary history as a double Booke
The ideal chronicler of the new South Africa, he deserves to make literary history as a double Booke
Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke, or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.
I do not particularly believe a life without laughter is a necessity to the pursuit of great art, but I do want to draw attention to the focus, repetition, and discipline of professionals in the creative industries.
Read the full articles when/if you have the time. The important info has been cited here.
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