It's Good to Have a Certain Doggedness

It's good to have a certain doggedness to your technique. In college I was struck by the fact that Bernard Shaw, who became a playwright only after writing five novels, would sit in the British Museum, the reading room, and his quota was something like maybe five pages a day, but when he got to the last word on the last page—whether it was the middle of a sentence—he would stop. So this notion that when you have a quota, whether it's two pages or—three is how I think of it, three pages—that it's a fairly modest quota, but nevertheless if you do it, really do it, the stuff will accumulate.

JOHN UPDIKE