How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.

The way you live your days is the way you live your life.

Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.