15 people who prove you don't have to wake up early to be successful

Schulz is hardly the first writer to find that she's at her most alert when everyone else is at their most asleep. Not that she's necessarily happy about it. "I sometimes think I would give anything to be a morning person," she writes in New York magazine.

Instead, her writing brain kicks in at about 10 p.m., she explains. Just after 3 a.m., she's faced with a choice. "If I put my work away and go to bed, I will fall asleep almost instantly, and can be up and functional again by nine." Or she can stay up for the rest of the night, napping for a few hours, "from six to eight, or eight to ten."

The mayor, who is known for his occasional tardiness, has been upfront about his ideal schedule. "I am not a morning person," he once confessed on the campaign trail. "I think we should reorient our society [to] staying up late, but I don’t think that's happening right now."

While de Blasio's schedule — including his oft-discussed 9 a.m. gym sessions — is hardly unheard of, it's a far cry from the larkish routines of recent predecessors. Bloomberg was known to jog at 5 a.m., and Giuliani was in meetings with senior staff by 8 a.m.

Comedians may be known for their late schedules — it's part of the job description — but even by industry standards, Noah's schedule is extreme.

As he tells Jerry Seinfeld on an episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," his "morning" begins at 6 p.m., when he wakes up, reads the news, takes a shower, and dresses. Then he heads out to perform his first set of the night, which usually starts around 7 p.m.

While Churchill was not a particularly late riser — he awoke around 7:30 a.m. — he did not actually get out of bed until 11 a.m., according to the blog Daily Routines.

Instead, he woke up, "remained in bed for a substantial breakfast and reading of mail and all the national newspapers." After that — still from bed — he'd begin his workday, dictating to his secretaries, before finally rising to bathe before noon.

The CEO of the cloud file-syncing and file-sharing company Box wakes up at 10 a.m. and, following in the footsteps of greats like Churchill, he begins his day from the comfort of his covers.

"I know this is not a best practice," Levie admits in Fast Company, "but I read email. I'm in bed for 30 minutes swiping, replying, and deleting. I try to make sure I have no unread messages by the time I get into the office."

"I almost never get home at midnight," award-winning novelist Cynthia Ozick told The Paris Review in 1985. "I'm always the last to leave a party."

The very idea of "regular working hours" seemed to amuse her. "You're talking as if there's some sort of predictable schedule," she said. "I don't have working hours. I wake up late. I read the mail, which sometimes is a very complex procedure."

Flaubert, whose "Madame Bovary" helped define the modern novel, began his days at 10 a.m., according to Mason Currey's book "Daily Rituals."

Upon waking, he'd ring for the servants to bring him his newspapers, his mail, a glass of cold water, and a filled pipe. Temporarily sated, he would then "signal for his mother to come in and sit on the bed for an intimate chat until he decided to get up."

"I'm usually up pretty late," Ohanian tells Fast Company — on average, he's not in bed until 2 — "so I try to be up by 10 a.m."

Then, it's first things first. "The first thing I do is use the bathroom, then I make some coffee," he says, before correcting himself. "No, the absolute first thing I do is feed my cat because he usually wakes me up."

Like his friends Flaubert and Box CEO Aaron Levie, the modernist legend woke "about 10 o'clock," according to Currey's "Daily Rituals."

Then, his biographer Richard Ellman reports, Joyce would eat "coffee and rolls in bed," and then lie there, "smothered in his own thoughts," until about 11 a.m. Sometimes, these thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of his "Polish tailor," who would "sit discoursing on the edge of the bed while Joyce listened and nodded."

In an interview with Lifehacker, Lehman, CEO of the annotation site Genius (formerly Rap Genius), admits he's not much for the sunrise. "But if I do happen to wake up early — and especially if I go to the gym first thing — I make sure to tell everyone about it," he adds.

The second he wakes up, he's checking the internet — Hacker News and Twitter, to start — which he considers "a true guilty pleasure!"

Williams, who, in addition to being a Grammy-winning musician, is also a fashion designer, record producer, textile manufacturer (he's a partner in Bionic Yarn), philanthropist, and media mogul, starts his days at the very reasonable hour of 9 a.m., according to Fast Company.

"The first thing I do is thank the master," he says. Then, he hops in the shower, "and that's where a lot of my concepts come from. I write songs in there sometimes." If he's late, he says, it's not traffic — it's the shower.

According to a 1934 New Yorker profile, the writer and poet — a die-hard night owl — woke daily at 10 a.m., and reluctantly drank a cup of coffee.

"She's always nervous about becoming nervous and she thought coffee would make her nervous," the profile explains, "but her doctor prescribed it." Once awake and caffeinated, Stein would bathe, and begin the day's writing.

The "king of fashion" isn't necessarily a late-riser — he's just a person who rises only when he's had seven hours of solid sleep.

"If I go to bed at two, I wake up at nine," he explains in Harper's Bazaar. "If I go to bed at midnight, I wake up at seven. I don't wake up before — the house can fall apart, but I sleep for seven hours."

To get the most out of his seven hours, he wears a "long, full-length white shirt, in a material called poplin imperial," made especially for him.

"I've got the old Eight Street habit of sleeping all day and working all night pretty well licked," the painter told a reporter in 1950, but even in his later years, he was no early bird.

According to Currey's "Daily Rituals," Pollock would sleep (with the phone off the hook, so as not to be disturbed) until 1 p.m., when he'd get up, take his customary breakfast (coffee and a cigarette), and head out to his barn to paint until it was time for his customary walk with his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, around 6 p.m.