Garrison Keillor

Writing Habits
Get up early, make coffee, write.

Advice to Writers
Writing is a sacred calling -- but so are gardening, dentistry and plumbing, so don't put on airs. Writers are journalists before they're anything else. You keep coming back to journalism, which is continually hard work, to describe action, to narrate a sequence of events and somehow keep your own fine sensibility out of it, to simply say how the game progressed. In all the best poems you find precise reporting, and this has very little to do with the mood of the writer. You can write comedy when you're sick, when you're lonely as a barn owl and your head hurts and your friends are mad at you. It's just work, that's all, and you go do it if you need to. It's a good life being a writer. Be grateful for it. And don't give advice to writers, no matter who asks you to.

- Garrison Keillor

source