After reading Gardner's Creating Minds and Mason Currey's Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, I learned that a number of overachieving artists like Picasso slept very little compared to the average person.
Not only did the Paris Review reveal that Nabokov worked on the translation and commentary of Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse for over 17 hours per day, I recently read in Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years that Nabokov slept approximately four hours per day.
Lastly, according to a New York magazine profile, James Franco gets very little sleep and Franco fittingly wrote the poem "Nocturnal" in his volume of poetry, Directing Herbert White, about his battle with slumber, which I'm confident that a lot of other overachieving writers could relate to.
