Quotes About Work

But only if I believe that my directing talents will improve the material I'd be working on. I want to make sure I don't sacrifice beautiful material on the altar of my direction.

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.

Poor people want to be poor; if they just worked harder they could have more.

At the end of the whole day of working with people you want some privacy.

I've got about three minutes to get ready in the morning before dropping my kids at school and going to the office. But even with limited time, I still want to look natural and pretty.

If you do a fifteen hour day on a film, there's a lot of time standing around but at the end of that, you want to go home to your hotel room and have a bite to eat, watch a movie and go to bed.

In the daytime, you act the way you should act because that is what people pay you for, or want from you.

I love what I do, but I never want to OD on celebrity.

Rellock wants to go back to fishing, hee hee! But the place you left is not what you return to, oh no. From one day to the next, never mind years. Rellock's done work guided by the hands of gods, yet he dreams of dragging nets, with the sun on his face and lines between his toes! He is the heart of the Empire - Laseen should take note! Take note!

There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.

The dreamtime of creative work is a turnstile to eternity. (from Workbok)

I work hard in the orchard, not for the money anymore, but for something I can't explain. Something worth more than money.

Apparently, Ellory had been right yesterday when he told me that Chekov was a ghost—Prague, Johannesburg, Rome, Hong Kong—Alexei would materialize out of nowhere, do his work, and then disappear. But at least now, thanks to the video surveillance cameras at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, we had a photo of him.

True diligence runs contrary to human nature.

If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round. Unless we invert this equation, much of our capacity for intrinsic motivation starts to shut down. We lose touch with our passion and become less than what we could be and that feeling never really goes away.

there were no artificial obstacles, things that are insisted upon that make it hard for people to get any work done — things like bureaucracy, security, refusals to share with other people.

Page once said that anyone hired at Google should be capable of engaging him in a fascinating discussion should he be stuck at an airport with the employee on a business trip. The implication was that every Googler should converse at the level of Jared Diamond or the ghost of Alan Turing. The idea was to create a charged intellectual atmosphere that makes people want to come to work.

And I have always believed that one's politics and the character of his particular work are inseparable.

Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.

We designed Google to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free. - Urs Hölzle

It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings. [ Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005 ]

The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

Riches should come as the reward for hard work, preferably by one's forebears

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.