Quotes About Productivity

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Work. Don't Think. Relax.

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time— And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.

It's bad to get up early, stand at your typewriter and work, then find it's nothing and take a bottle to bed.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow.

Leisure." "Oh, but we've plenty of off hours." "Off hours, yes. But time to think?

What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency.

The true sources of wealth are the productivity, creativity, and vitality of our people; the advances of science and technology that have been so marked over the past two and a half centuries; and the advances in economic, political, and social organization that have occurred over the same period, including the rule of law, competitive, well-regulated markets, and democratic institutions with checks, balances, and a broad range of "truth-telling" institutions.

While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it.

While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it. Don't you agree?

multitasking isn't actually possible. In the same way that we can only focus on one sense perception, we can really only focus on one task at a time.

May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I'd be allowed to decide anything at all.

We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.

almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on

Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days.

Though major depression is often associated with lethargy to the point of being frozen, many people with chronic depression not only work well but devote more energy to their vocation than to any other endeavor.

I cannot abide useless people.

I just thought, 'Wait a minute, if I'm going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.' And this is the least quiet place I've ever been in my life. … It's like taking the bar exam at Coachella. It's like, 'Um, I really need to concentrate on this! Guys! Can you all just…I have to…It's super important for my law!

We never have time, do we, for all that we don't exactly want to do.

Keeping busy" is the remedy for all ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

I choose to believe Herb Yellin when he says I am a major writer now for one can choose to believe any number of things, encouraging, discouraging, good, bad, neutral, far-fetched, probable, amusing, tragic; etc. and I choose quite openly, quite deliberately, and I hope with a certain modesty, to believe the things, the phrases, the judgments of strangers, that will put me in the most productive mood...that will make me, simply, happier.

I had never been productive in beautiful, serene settings. I needed noise, activity, some kind of external energy to get me going.