A Quote by Siddhartha Mukherjee

I once set myself a deadline: half a chapter a week, 20 minutes a day. The thought froze me instantly, like literary Botox. I returned to my non-schedule: sleeping, writing 20 minutes, and then back to sleep. Breakfast in bed, with juice congealing on the sill: pages and pages began to pour out again.
The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.
A typical day in my writing life starts with looking at pictures of real estate online for at least 20 minutes. If I happen to be actually in the market for a house, I do this for 40 minutes. Then I walk my dog, come back home, and tell myself I can look at real estate for another five minutes.
I learned this lesson too late, frankly: Do not judge it while you're doing it. Do not go back and fix things that are 20 pages ago when you're already 20 pages past that.
I write pretty fast, probably faster than most people. But I might think about something for six hours, then write it in 20 minutes. So did I write for six hours and 20 minutes, or just 20 minutes? I used to write absolutely every day, except for days when I had to travel or something.
I always say you just need 20 minutes a day. That is it: 20 minutes to do really fast circuits, and you can bring some weights with you to work.
I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like “Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn’t a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself”. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt.
I grew up down in the hills of Virginia. I can be in Kentucky in 20 minutes, Tennessee in 20 minutes or in the state of West Virginia in 20 minutes. And it's down in the Appalachian Mountains, down there. And it's sort of a poorer country. Most of the livelihood is coal mining and logging, working in the woods and things like that. Most people has a hard life down that way.
What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you're always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, 'I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.
What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you're always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, 'I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.'
It's like, the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in, and your day is shredded to bits because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do.
I enjoy having breakfast in bed. I like waking up to the smell of bacon, sue me. And since I don't have a butler, I have to do it myself. So, most nights before I go to bed, I will lay six strips of bacon out on my George Foreman grill. Then I go to sleep. When I wake up, I plug in the grill. I go back to sleep again. Then I wake up to the smell of crackling bacon. It is delicious, it's good for me, it's the perfect way to start the day.
I was lucky enough to get to perform on stage in front of 20 million people on TV, and 150 thousand in concerts. For 15 minutes I got to be a rock star, the 15 minutes is great! It turns into Spinal Tap after 20 minutes.
I believe in sensible, moderate exercise. I try to do something every day, at least 20 minutes per day. I don't think it's realistic to ask people to work out 90 minutes a day.
I work out five days a week for 20 minutes; I only do one body part a day.
If I play two minutes, three minutes, 20 minutes, it don't matter to me. As long as we win.
Normally, when I read a script, I read 30 pages, and then go have a cup of tea and come back. And then, I read 20 pages and go make a phone call, and then go back to it.
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