A REVIEW OF DAILY RITUALS: HOW ARTISTS WORK
Number of artists included in Daily Rituals: 161
Number of women: 27
Number of routines that include walks: 40
Minimum number of artists who could be said to have obsessive rituals relating to coffee: 6
Number of croissants Proust ate every day when writing: 1 or 2
Artist with the best mnemonic device: Jonathan Edwards, who would “pin a small piece of paper on a particular part of his clothes, which he would associate with [a] thought”
Partial list of proven ways to avoid creative blocks: stroking one’s genitals (Thomas Wolfe), standing on one’s head (Igor Stravinsky), taking a shower (Woody Allen), smelling a drawer of decaying apples (Friedrich Schiller), photographing “filth and decay” (William Gass)
