“Before I was a writer, I tried to live like a writer and that was my great adolescent mistake. As Zadie Smith says, ‘There is no writer’s lifestyle.’ Either you write or you don’t. In one of his letters, Flaubert wrote that we should be ordered and regular in our daily lives so that we may be violent and original in our work. Nothing has changed or improved my writing more than the establishment of that order, of calm. I write every morning at the same place. I save the chaos and disarray for my stories.”
—Alexander Maksik, author of You Deserve Nothing (Europa Editions, 2011)