How do creative people work? How do they manage to build their day so that the daily routine becomes part of the creative process? When there is not enough time for what you have planned, should you sacrifice everything - sleep, a decent income, cleanliness in the house - or can you develop the ability to concentrate efforts, work less and better? Beethoven and Kafka, George Sand and Picasso, Woody Allen and Agatha Christie, Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Charles Dickens, John Updike. Writers, composers, artists, choreographers, playwrights, philosophers, cartoonists, comedians, poets, sculptors? Excerpts from letters and diaries, interviews and personal conversations - Curry collects evidence from everywhere about how the great ones create. These short sketches can entertain, captivate, and inspire; they help to penetrate into the "deep, living fusion of discipline and licentiousness" that makes up and feeds the creative temperament. The reader will learn about how celebrities combined life and work, what schedule they followed, how they fought their fears, fatigue and doubts, how they ate, slept, talked, walked - in a word, about all those "cunning rituals" that helped them become great.