In the mornings, I try to spend anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes with my son. Failing that, I try for 30 to 60 minutes together at the end of the day. I try to make that work, but if I can't, I just move on. You can't beat yourself up about it.

My family has always been very close. Ever since I was a kid, everybody was always together, including my grandma. In the mornings, my mom would work, and my grandma would help me get ready and would walk me to school. We were all so close to her.

I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices. But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly. I think it is just as important to sing about beautiful mornings as it is to talk about slums. I just couldn't write anything without hope in it.

If it wasn't for my trainer - who comes looking for me three times a week before 7 A.M. - I wouldn't get my butt out of bed and into the gym. There are many mornings when I think about faking a sprained ankle, but I just put it out of my head and make myself go.

I, for one, find writing excruciating. Some mornings, as I'm on my way to my desk, my hands actually tremble with fear. The fear, of course, is that I'll sit down at the desk and discover that what I've written is claptrap. Fear inevitably leads to procrastination.

I was hired as a sous-chef at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. The chef liked to drink - some mornings we would find him sleeping. Two weeks after its opening, I became the chef. I was 20 years old, and way over my head. I had to hire the cooks and do the menus.

We took the craziest cruises across Europe. And I went on a jungle safari in Ranthambhore. We stayed in the Ranthambhore Palace. We had heard that one gets to spot the tiger in the early mornings and every moment I was getting those Discovery Channel glimpses in my mind!

The mornings along the coast where the fog and mist meet with the salty spray of the seas is one of my favourite smells. I love the smell in the evergreen forest just after it rains - The Redwood Forest in California has the coast, too, so you have the best of everything!

I write in the mornings. I get up every morning at about six in the morning and write until nine, hop in the shower and go to work. Nighttime I usually reserve for re-reading what I've done that morning. I would be lying if I said I stuck to that schedule every single day.

The best times to visit the Gobi and Three Camel Lodge are June, and September through October. By the beginning of November, it is ferociously cold, while October can swing surreally between warm days and clear, chilly nights and frosty mornings dusted with snow - perfect.

I wake at 5 or 5:30 most mornings, make myself a latte and grab a cookie, write until 10 or 11, go have my favorite meal, 'second breakfast,' or grab coffee with friends, or play basketball. Then, around noon, I begin apologizing via email for the manuscripts I can't get to.

I wasn't as used to the new dumb questions, so when men I had once thought of as wise daddies now asked me 'How do you write?' I did not try and spill red wine in their suede pants. I would just smile and say, 'On a typewriter in the mornings when there's nothing else to do.'

The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I'm tired. I have been tired for decades. I am tired in the morning and I am tired while becalmed in the slough of the afternoon, and I am tired in the evening, except right when I try to go to sleep.

I know this is going to sound corny, but I love my life. I love my baby, so I love getting to wake up with him. And I have the most amazing job, with writing that any actor would love and costars who I can't wait to see on Monday mornings. And I love coming home to my husband.

Cities can be paradoxical places. In the mornings they buzz with commuters, in the evenings they come alive with diners and partygoers, at weekends the streets fill with shoppers and market traders. But amidst the hustle and bustle, even the greatest city can be a lonely place.

During my pre-college years, I went on many trips with my father into the oil fields to visit their operations. On Saturday mornings, I often went with him to visit the company shop. I puttered around the machine, electronics, and automobile shops while he carried on his business.

My part of Brooklyn has always been a very warm neighbourhood, even before I had anything going on in the music industry. When I step out of my house to go for coffee on Saturday mornings, I might say hi to 20 people before I get to the cafe. I think they feel they own me, in a way.

I pray every day. In the mornings and, before I go to bed. I think it's important to pray not just when things are going bad. When things are going bad, it's easy to pray and ask God to help you out, but it's also important to pray when things are going well and show your appreciation.

Discover the times when you're most creative - mornings, nights, afternoons - and clear the time to work then. Many writers find the mornings are best, and the afternoons are only good for editorial corrections, or getting the washing done. Others can only work through the night, drunk.

Scotland is so gorgeous that every time I'm there, I start to dream of living there. I want to buy one of those whitewashed cottages with the thatch roofs and gaze out at the sea and read my books. I want to be away from the Internet and the news and lawn mowers at 7 A.M. on Sunday mornings.

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

They decided to no longer air my messages on 'The Hour of Power.' They felt they could have greater impact if they had lots of different preachers. 'The Hour of Power' owns the Crystal Cathedral, and the owners, in effect, evicted me... so that they could have other preachers on Sunday mornings.

I was brought up in Guildford, and I think I used to absorb all the suburban things - seeing coffee mornings, women talking... that stuff, really. I was watching Alan Ayckbourn on some documentary, and he was talking about how he was around a lot of women as a child, listening to all that stuff.

A lot of my friends, when I was 14 or 15, they were all up and down, wanting to go out on a Friday night, and my dad had me working really late on Fridays and Saturday mornings and even on Sunday mornings. And when I'd finished all that, we used to spend the rest of the time talking about boxing.

It's important to take time away from the Internet as much as possible. For me, I love working out, and my husband and I do it together in the mornings! And it's really our time to check in with each other, but it's also our time to really not think about work or what's happening on the Internet.

Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.

When stuck years ago in a job I hated, my only friend was the public bench. As the tedious mornings dragged on, how I would long for the lunch hour, when I would be able to escape the torture of the office and stroll over to the churchyard and into the comforting wooden embrace of one of its benches.

I train in the mornings, and I'll eat two breakfasts. I'll have waffles with flax seed and almond butter and one egg scrambled. Then I'll work out and have a second breakfast - another egg or a protein shake. Within a half-hour to 40 minutes after a workout, that's when you want to load up on protein.

When I was a boy, I had a baseball team of my own. We played on a vacant lot between Ninetieth and Ninety-second streets. I had a little menagerie of my own, some pigeons, guinea pigs, and so on. On Saturday mornings, I had to take my music lesson. Then the members of my team used to come see my menagerie.

Some people feel stronger in their 30s. I'm 34. I've noticed I do feel stronger now than when I was 24. But I'm also more sore in the mornings. If I have a bump or a bruise from practice, it takes me a little bit more than just an ice bath to get rid of it. At the end of the week, my body's ready for a day off.

I grew up in Harlem. My grandmother was one of the best cooks around, but the first thing she did on Sunday mornings when she started cooking a daylong meal was to take a big block of lard from the back of the refrigerator and throw it into the pan. I know how Hispanics buy their food, and it is not always nutritious.

My favorite part was when my grandfather and I would make a special trip to Firpo's Bakery for red and green Christmas cookies and fruitcake studded with the sweetest cherries I've ever tasted. Usually Firpo's was too expensive for our slim budget, but Christmas mornings they gave a discount to any children who came in.

So many people grew up in the church, and you can have an awesome upbringing, but I made a personal conviction; I made a personal decision when I was very young. I enjoy going to church without my parents. On Sunday mornings, I want to go. Bible studies on Wednesdays... I have a relationship - not just through my parents.

But for me, I thought you made a record, you got on a bus, went out and played your shows and made a lot of money. That was the way it was supposed to go down. But there's a lot more to it than that. There are a lot of early mornings, late nights, a lot of traveling, a lot of being away from home, being away from your family.

Although I could read before I went to school, and I won the school reading prize at five years old, my early children's stories came from the radio and watching films at a cinema on Saturday mornings in Australia. It wasn't until I was nine years old on a ship returning from Australia that I was introduced to children's books.

In 1941, the BBC was setting up local, low-powered transmitters that were switched off if there was an air raid so they couldn't be used by German planes to navigate. As a 'youth in training,' my job was to switch the transmitter on in the mornings and off at night, and to check that it, and the feeder land lines, were working.

I was often looked at as a leper by kids at school because I was a Jehovah's Witness. They didn't like it - you were 'weird'. And on Saturday mornings, you'd be knocking at their doors. I remember standing there with my mum and dad, thinking, 'Oh my God, I know whose door this is, and I'll have to see them on Monday.' It was terrible.

David Harrington asked me to write a piece for Kronos Quartet for a performance in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I live just two blocks from the park and spend many mornings running around it. The park for me symbolizes much of what I love about New York, especially the stunning diversity of Brooklyn with its myriad cultures and communities.

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.

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