The best hours are the ones nobody asks for. They arrive before the day has decided what it wants from you, and they leave without ceremony, and what happens in them is almost never what you planned.

I have kept the same desk for eleven years. It is not a good desk. One leg is shorter than the others and I have never fixed it, because the small tilt reminds me, every time I sit down, that the work is not going to be perfect either, and that this has never once stopped anybody.

What I have learned about working slowly is that it is not slow. It only looks that way from the outside. From inside it feels like the only speed at which anything holds together.

There is a particular hour, somewhere between the first coffee and the second, when the work stops feeling like a performance. Nothing on the page has changed. What has changed is that you have stopped listening for applause.

The trick, if there is one, is to start before you are ready. Readiness is a story you tell yourself about a future morning that will be calmer than this one, and it will not be. The calm is something you make, badly at first, out of whatever the day has left lying around.

I write the first sentence standing up. I do not know why this works and I have stopped asking. Somewhere in the business of not sitting down the sentence loses its self-consciousness, and by the time I take the chair there is something on the page to argue with.