From an interview with one of my heroes, Samuel Clemens, in the New York Times, 1905:
“Whenever I’ve got some work to do I go to bed.”
“I got into that habit some time ago when I had an attack of bronchitis. Suppose your bronchitis lasts six weeks. The first two you can’t do much but attend to the barking and so on, but the last four I found I could work if I stayed in bed and when you can work you don’t mind staying in bed.
“I liked it so well that I kept it up after I got well. There are a lot of advantages about it. If you’re sitting at a desk you get excited about what you are doing, and the first thing you know the steam heat or the furnace has raised the temperature until you’ve almost got a fever, or the fire in the grate goes out and you get a chill, or if somebody comes in to attend to the fire he interrupts you and gets you off the trail of that idea you are pursuing.
“So I go to bed. I can keep an equable temperature there without trying and go on about my work without being bothered. Work in bed is a pretty good gospel – at least for a man who’s come, like me, to the time of life when his blood is easily frosted.”
