"Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can't think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., used guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt)."
–– John Durham Peters (b. 1958), American historian, social theorist, professor, and author
Source: John Durham Peters in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books via Submitted For Your Perusal, weblog July 14, 2015 via Austin Kleon newsletter June 21, 2024.
via: Sketchbook L, 2024, p. 35-36.
