I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed.

I believe in the healing restorative power of art and communication. And so that’s probably my rule. But that doesn’t apply to bedtimes. And stuff like that.

I’m interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We’re all victims and few of us are truly free.

We haven‘t really – it’s harder for us to set those rhythms. So it’s really important to keep a steady bedtime and wake time to really lock in those rhythms.

Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.

I’m not great at bedtime stories. Bedtime stories are supposed to put the kid to sleep. My kid gets riled up and then my wife has to come in and go, ‘All right! Get out of the room.’

My four-year-old daughter regularly requests reading Book One [the March] at bedtime; the methods of reading, delivering, and processing the book‘s content vary according to a kid’s age and developmental level, but she‘s deeply affected by the story, asking follow-up questions for days.

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by One after one; the sound of rain, and bees Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas, Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky – I’ve thought of all by turns, and still I lie Sleepless.

Studies have shown that people who are physically active sleep better than those who are sedentary. The more energy you expend during the day, the sleepier you will feel at bedtime.

Every day when I wake I tell myself that it will be my last. If you are not trying to hold on to time, you are not so afraid of losing it… And then, if you make it to bedtime, you feel the joy of cheating death out of one more day.

Writers’ bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor‘s early wake-up call.

Some guys joke, ‘Oh, you have a bedtime.’ But I’ve got to be able to function the next day at the top level.

Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine!

My dad did every single accent under the sun, and he would read bedtime stories.

When you say ‘Bedtime, bedtime, bedtime!’ that’s not what the child hears. What the child hears is ‘Lie down in the dark… for hours… and don’t move… I’m locking the door now.’

Much of my reading time over the last decade and a half has been spent reading aloud to my children. Those children’s bedtime rituals of supper, bath, stories, and sleep have been a staple of my life and some of the best, most special times I can remember.

In this 21st century, bedtime doesn’t matter at all. All that matters is what you set for your DVR [Digital Video Recorder].

The colossal might of wickedness: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.

When I was eight we went to Las Vegas for my brother Michael‘s 21st birthday, and my bedtime was pushed back quite late. I was always waking up as everyone was rolling in from their night out. It was an eye-opener!

Any food products made from flour, especially whole-wheat flour, form gas when broken down in the large intestine. Beware of eating these types of food before bedtime to avoid feeling inflated in the morning.

And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.

So much for modern science and its wonderful discoveries that just about everything can kill you. Life is only a bedtime story before a long, long sleep.

Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly – are done worst when we try hardest to do them.

Kids don’t eat fast. They take their time; they talk and laugh. Sometimes it’s really annoying, because you’re like, ‘Come on, it’s bedtime!’ But try it: You’ll fill up before you know it, because it takes 20 minutes for your brain to know your stomach is full.

I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.

When I am an old man, I will tell my grandchildren bedtime stories about when I won the Champions League, hopefully when I won the World Cup, but most of all, I will tell them that their grandfather used to play with Lionel Messi.

The first thing we did was change all the clocks so that her siblings thought it was bedtime, then put them to bed ignoring their plaintive protests that they were not tired. They wept themselves to sleep soon enough.

Just before bedtime prayers, evaluate each day. Make plans for tomorrow that will move you toward your long-range goal. Strive for a close partnership with God in making your dreams come true.

And I have to consider myself fortunate, because there are plenty of writers who spend most of a lifetime looking for that certain something without ever finding it.

But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.

Writers never get a very good deal in Hollywood.

Some boy nuh know dis, dem only come around like tourist. On the beach with a few club sodas. Bedtime stories, and pose like dem name Chuck Norris and don’t know the real hardcore.

Like, really like you. And i want that kiss to have been the start of something. Not the end.

To me, the special parts of the day – and also the ones that fit with a full-time job – are bedtime and wake-up time. So I try really hard to be there for my kids as many of those nights and mornings as I can.

I pledged myself to smoke but one cigar a day. I kept the cigar waiting until bedtime, then I had a luxurious time with it. But desire persecuted me every day and all day long. I found myself hunting for larger cigars…within the month my cigar had grown to such proportions I could have used it as a crutch.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

I think the special thing about Python is that it’s a writers’ commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled.

I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy.

A lot of our writers, like Conan O’Brien, moved on to other things.

Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber – teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.

The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.

Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep. It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak.

I’m pretty earthy; I nursed forever because I liked it and my kids liked it, but at the same time I’m very laissez-faire about stuff like bedtimes and food.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We’re dreamers, you see, but we’re also realists, of a sort.

I have a daughter, Hanna, and I never read fairy tales to her. But I did tell her bedtime tales and made up many tales involving ‘Gory the Goblin‘ and other creatures that I borrowed from the Grimms’ tales and other tales I knew.

I just used to make up stories for the kids at bedtime and my wife goes, ‘you should start putting that stuff down.’ It’s such a joy to do.

Both my daughters are both so unimpressed when they see me on television. I want them to say, ‘Oh, Dad!’ But I say, ‘Who’s that?’ and they say ‘Dad’ with no real interest, even if I’m wearing a long wig and riding on a horse! I think I’ll have to read a ‘CBeebies’ bedtime story instead.

For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict – because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.

Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical.

Bedtime is truly one of my favorite times.

The legend of a cable company trying to break the Internet makes scary bedtime stories for children of telecom geeks, but it is not reality.

Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.

Any kid will run any errand for you, if you ask at bedtime.

It’s a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it’s light out.

Children from the age of five to ten should watch more television. Television depicts adults as rotten SOB’s given to fistfights, gunplay, and other mayhem. Kids who believe this about grownups aren’t likely to argue about bedtime.

Many childrens writers dont have children of their own

I suppose a fire that burns that bright is not meant to last.

My mother wrote poetry when I was young – I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter – and my father told me inventive bedtime stories.

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.

Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some chamomile tea: “One table-spoonful to be taken at bedtime.

I like this job – most days I have a chance to make breakfast and take the kids to school or to read ’em a bedtime story. It’s almost like a normal life.

A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.

Bedtime is when I get most anxious because I have time to contemplate. I’m also more likely to question my mortality and catastrophise if I’ve seen or heard something upsetting about somebody.

Honestly, I don’t focus on what my writing is called. I don’t mean to sound artsy and pretentious, I just really can’t think of things in that way. For me, the point is telling a story that keeps people up past bedtime, while hopefully exploring ideas that resonate.

The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.

I’d love to do some bedtime stories for kids or that kind of thing. But with the demands of the shooting schedule and balancing the demands of being a single mother, it’s a wonder you can squeeze in anything.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Bedtime stories were definitely a big part of my life because I was just so excited my father was talking to me.

There were five writers on Blazing Saddles.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

I don’t remember my father reading to me, but I remember him telling me bedtime stories. I got to pick what was in them, and then he’d make them up.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed, and can’t get there, is the meanest feeling in the world.

To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I’m telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.

Give yourself permission to dream. Fuel your kids’ dreams too. Once in a while, that might even mean letting them stay up past their bedtimes.

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.

Don’t fight with the pillow, but lay down your head And kick every worriment out of the bed.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish – occasionally I do windows.

I don’t ever remember not praying. Bedtime prayers, the rosary, praying for friends, relatives, for the sick and for those who had died. It was a natural part of our lives.

The persons hardest to convince that they’re at the retirement age are children at bedtime.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

I did start reading quite young but I was always read to by my parents, who are both actors. Bedtime stories from when I was about two/three to when I was about 15. In fact they didn’t stop until I eventually kind of kicked them out of my bedroom.

When I was a kid, my dad would let me stay up and watch ‘Cheers‘ each week. Granted it’s not the most ‘kid friendly‘ show, but I could’ve cared less. I was getting to stay up past my bedtime!

We read to our kids at bedtime because we want to have literacy, but what are we doing to make sure kids are equally fascinated by science?

My family fled Iran in October 1978 as a result of the coming revolution when I was two years old. In the early days, my entire family lived together in a very crowded house, where I shared a room with my sister, cousin, and grandmother, and we would all listen to my grandmother tell stories before bedtime.

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

The spark for ‘In Praise of Slowness‘ came when I began reading to my children. Every parent knows that kids like their bedtime stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. But I used to be too fast to slow down with the Brothers Grimm. I would zoom through the classic fairy tales, skipping lines, paragraphs, whole pages.

There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

My bedtime was 8 P.M. But on Cosby nights, I got to stay up until 8:30. Real big deal. This is when they could afford to do a completely different title sequence in TV every year. I always looked forward to that. It was like a mini musical at the top of the show. My favorite was the Top Hat fancy version.

Ironically, to my children, bedtime is a punishment that violates their basic rights as human beings.

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.

When I was a kid, my father would read Neil Simon plays with me, when I was going to bed, as bedtime stories.

So even though ‘Sanditon’ was filmed in Gloucestershire on the coast, which was gorgeous, it meant I could finish work, get home, and do a few bedtime stories.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

I do see a lot of my kids, but sometimes I feel as though we have snatched moments. I turn up half way through something, or I only see her at bedtime. I’d like there to be more.

Laugh and the world laughs with you!

It’s not like I’m back for bath-time and bedtime for the children. You’re back when they are asleep and you go out before they wake up. Really, that time when they are young goes all too quickly.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

All the things that most kids hated, I loved. I loved that things were asked of me and that, much to my surprise, I was able to do them. I loved the 10 o’clock bedtime. I loved the responsibility.

Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread, with bitter tiding laden, shall summon to unwelcome bed a melancholy maiden! We are but older children, dear, who fret to find our bedtime near.

Three meals plus bedtime make four sure blessings a day.

It appears that every man‘s insomnia is as different from his neighbours as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.

I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.

Whatever our bedtime was as kids, we could stay up an extra half hour if we were reading. My parents didn’t care as long as I was under the spell of a Stephen King or a Douglas Adams. Now I read in bed. I read at work. I read standing in line. It’s like, ‘Hello, my name is Nathan and I am a reader.’

And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.

For the first three years of his life, my son insisted on hearing ‘Goodnight Moon‘ before bedtime. Like most babies, he was not a good sleeper by disposition – but reading seemed to help, and this book specifically became part of his whole wind-down ritual.

Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren’t proper words for communicating what should be done with it.

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

Holidays are also an opportunity for kids to unlearn every good habit they’ve learned during the rest of the year. They don’t go to school. They get to stay up past their bedtime. They get candy and presents for doing nothing. Childhood utopia.

But love, I’ve come to understand, is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Working 90 hours a week is easily racked up when you’re self-employed and rely on portable tech to do your work; your train journeys, toilet breaks, leisurely walks, bedtime, can all become ‘working hours’. Reclaim them.

To business that we love we rise bedtime, and go to’t with delight.

The worst thing in the world is to be bland.

Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half-open, allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, using the dim hallway light to read by, if I needed to. I always needed to.

Damn it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth?

These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

It pretty much defeats the purpose of bedtime reading if you fall asleep before the kids do. And you tend to wake up with a matchbox stuck on the end of your nose and/or a potty on your head.

I started writing really early on, and my brother Jordan was my first audience. I would come up with scary stories to tell him at bedtime.

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.

Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

Unfortunately, I suffer from insomnia, so my bedtime is as soon as I start to feel the least bit sleepy.

I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes.

A half-hour before bedtime, I remind myself that I now deserve to prepare myself for a good night‘s sleep. You can’t focus on your work if you’re sleep-deprived even if you have a fascinating job.

I used to go to Cold Stone Creamery, get a tub of Butterfinger ice cream, and eat it all before bedtime. And my fingers were permanently stained orange from Cheetos.

My dad would tell me bedtime stories, and he used to always leave them open-ended and finish at a crucial point with the words, ‘dream on’. Then it was my responsibility to finish the story as I was drifting off to sleep. We would call them dreaming stories.

Contrary to what many writers imply about the process, nobody forces a writer to sell his work to the film industry.

Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.

At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that’s good.

And I know these scars will bleed, but both of our hearts believe all of these stars will guide us home

Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

The theory that if wages go up, employment goes down isn’t a physical law like F=MA. It’s a moral law, like ‘Bedtime is 9:00 P.M.’

I learned that the hardest party to pull off successfully is Saturday night dinner. This meal is expected to be elaborate: appetizers, first course, dinner, dessert, and coffee. People arrive at 7:30 or 8 p.m. and stay for hours – definitely past my bedtime – and they all go home exhausted.