A Quote by Ruby Dee

You just try to do everything that comes up. Get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, make the time. Then you look back and say, ‘Well, that was a neat piece of juggling there -- school, marriage, babies, career.’ The enthusiasms took me through the action, not the measuring of it or the reasonableness.
If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.
Aim to write for an hour per day. I used to be a teacher, and an hour a day before school was all it took for me to write my first book. Don't get discouraged if a holiday or illness interrupts your writing habit. Just start it up again.
I try to do romantic gestures all the time. For instance, this morning I work up early -- earlier than I would have normally liked to have woken up. Elizabeth [Chambers] was still asleep, so I just laid in bed and cuddled with her for an hour. I just ran my hands over her body. It was nice.
My mornings start with mom coming into my bedroom and waking me up, or trying to wake me up, and then I go back to sleep. Then my mom wakes me up again and yells at me. Then she'll get me to wake up, and I'll get dressed and go to school. We go to school, and my teacher tells me that I didn't do the homework well enough. And that's that.
Kids don't say, "Wait." They say, "Wait up, hey wait up!" Because when you're little, your life is up. The future is up. Everything you want is up. "Hold up. Shut up! Mum, I'll clean up. Let me stay up!" Parents, of course, are just the opposite. Everything is down. "Just calm down. Slow down. Come down here! Sit down. Put... that... down."
Just let me do what I'm doing, and then when all of this is up, then you can say how my career was. Don't try to sum up my career in one or two seasons. Let me finish it first.
People went to bed when the sun went down and they woke up when the sun came up. That's what our bodies are naturally programmed to do. However, with all the new stresses in life with electricity, with technology, we tend to override that system and we'll stay up later and we'll get up earlier or later, and we use alarm clocks, we use the light.
I always look at these superhero films, and I see people hurdling towards at a hundred miles per hour, and then they get up, shake their head, and charge back at a hundred miles per hour. Nobody seems to really get injured or hurt. I don't find any threat in that. There is no tension in that whatsoever.
My advice to anyone with writerly ambitions and a demanding day job is to set aside a little piece of time, even an hour a week if that's all you can manage, and make it yours. This is your writing hour. Even if you use it up by staring at a blank screen and daydreaming, so what?
Although it's hard some days to wake up an hour earlier to do the gym workout as opposed to other skaters who just show up to the rink, I know that if I don't do it, my day will be much worse. I might as well not even skate, actually.
I enjoy the gym. I think if you're fit in your body, you're fit in your mind. So I get up most mornings and I'm first there usually. I stay in there for an hour, an hour and a half, do my work, shower and then I have a nice breakfast.
I was able to draw a lot from my own childhood, my friends' childhoods as well and my daughters' friends who are like my children as well. They multiply all the time. So you can have everything and say I can get all this done and then late at night one of your kids have a freak out about school or an assignment you end up staying up til 3 in morning helping them through it. Or somebody gets sick or has a crisis.
I found meditation. It was more out of pure desperation: I just started to wake up at 5 and sit for one hour, and suddenly, day after day, piece by piece, I could really feel I was coming back into me.
Even though I am not hungry when I get up, I try to eat to get me ready for the day. Within an hour of getting up.
When I began doing stand-up, it took me a long time to get an hour's worth of material together.
Stop complaining about having no time for yourself and get up an hour earlier. You have the option, why not exercise it?
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