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I spent many a summer early morning with the radio very low, half sleeping and half listening.
Another thing that’s quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you’ve written the next morning and you think you didn’t get it quite right, you can fix it.
It’s a miserable life in Hollywood. You’re up at five or six o’clock in the morning to be ready to start shooting at nine.
I went to Morocco, joined a band called Pegasus, ran out of money, went to Gibraltar and worked on the docks, writing songs about the sun and the morning and the birds.
For the first-time novelist you’ve got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7, make breakfast and go to work. Or, come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.
The next morning we saw nothing of the enemy, though we were still lying to.
The cool thing about writing is that there is really never a typical day. Sometimes I get a rhythm going and head off to work every morning and come home at night. Sometimes I’ll write for two days straight and then be utterly blank for the next two.
In a still hot morning, the tide went out and didn’t come back in. This was not a spectacular event. The sea did not roll up like a scroll, like the sky in Revelations. It quietly withdrew.
My aunt had a season ticket for the Friday afternoon concerts, and I would go down for lessons. My lessons were Saturday morning.
In a few days an officer came to our camp, under a flag of truce, and informed Hamilton, then a captain of artillery, but afterwards the aid of General Washington, that Captain Hale had been arrested within the British lines condemned as a spy, and executed that morning.