Quotes About Routine

performing the commonplace under uncommonplace conditions.

Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. I write only when inspiration strikes, he replied. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.

Why have I stressed professionalism so heavily? Because the most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his.

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

Often couples or close friends, even entire families, will enter into tacit compacts whereby each individual pledges (unconsciously) to remain mired in the same slough in which she and all her cronies have become so comfortable.

The soap and sponge were doing their thing.

same cup he always carried, his perpetual bourbon and Coke.

her. "How do you always know that stuff?" she asked. "Are you kidding? Everyone knows that stuff." He went back to the kitchen to start cleaning up. Meri crossed to the lilies. Bending over them

no longer looked for the exit. They just kept circling the tight perimeters of the glass, going in their familiar patterns. Their reality had shrunk to that jar. It had become their entire world. It had become safe. Life beyond it had ceased to exist. I'm in the jar, I thought.

It was a winter evening like so many others that passed in quiet predictability:

It was an odd habit, I thought, this insistence on driving a car in cities with public transportation.

No. I am retired from the post office for the last ten years. Most afternoons, it is my daily routine to arrive at three and leave at six." "Your routine seems very pleasant." Perveen imagined what her life might be like when she was alone and in her seventies.

guess I always felt even if the world came to an end, McDonald's would still be open. Mom

already starting to forget what normal life felt like, clocks

I had to make myself presentable. Doggedly I dosed myself with Alka-Seltzer.

she was counting the brushstrokes when she brushed her teeth — on the rare days that she did brush her teeth.

But Iris walks through the project every day. Alice asked, "Isn't it dangerous?" Iris said, "I don't know. I guess it could be, if you're afraid. I'm not because it's just something I've always done. I mean, if you live in it you aren't scared of it.

A matter of habit, didn't Mr. Sanger think? After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper vanished. And really, one was happier without.

Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.

My workout regimen at the moment is nonexistent. I wake up in the morning and brush my teeth. My toothbrush and deodorant are my only dumbbells. That's about it.

I play basketball probably four to five days a week when I'm back home.

I start to wonder what the people all around me do on days like today. I live in a box in the sky with boxes identical to mine on all sides, and forty stories of identical boxes below me. What do all those boxed people do on Saturdays?

Cops before breakfast. Before coffee even. As if Mondays weren't bad enough.