Quotes About Productivity

I probably did pack a lifetime's work into the 1980s.

And I think that, given the opportunity, somebody could really learn a lot just being around me and the girls because it's really nonstop, 24/7 brainstorming and creativity and just trying to get organized and really pack a lot into a day - being there nonstop with all engines blazing.

I write every day weekdays for about 5 hours, mostly longhand on legal pads. It has gotten neither harder nor easier, sadly or happily.

When I think about the books I've written, it probably takes 150,000-200,000 words to get a 50,000 page book. Highlighting something and hitting Cmd-X is second nature.

If I write a page a day, I feel very good about it.

I remember in the movies we used to do two pages a day. One in the morning and one in the afternoon.

A lot of feature films do two pages a day.

My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I'm always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

If I've written five pages by hand, out of those five pages, one page might be worth saving. The rest is crap. I have to throw it away. It's like I need eight hours to do two hours' work.

I can only write about two or three pages of fiction a day.

Anyone can sit down and write two pages of a novel, then forget about it, and a week later write five pages of a screenplay, then forget about it, and a week later start another novel... etc, etc.

When I'm working on a book, I try to do eight pages a week. That seems like a good amount. Less than that, I'm not getting a nice momentum, and more than that, I'm probably putting out too much crap.

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

Three hours of creating is taxing on any brain, and you should stop there. Some days, you may stop without any words at all. It's much easier to write new stuff the next day than to go through painful deletions of a day's worth of crap you already wrote.

Why sit on your butt watching 'Jersey Shore' when you can learn to paint a beautiful picture?

I use the computer as a paintbrush. It enables me to do in hours what would have taken months.

You just gotta record stuff and move on and make new material. Painters don't wait until they're in some specific gallery before they move on to the next painting.

I have ADD or something. Even when I am doing something, it's me on the computer, I'm painting and I'm writing music. I have to rotate what I'm doing every 15 minutes.

I would never finish a painting if I didn't have a deadline.

I stay in my pajamas until I have to leave for work.

If you stay in your pajamas the whole day, you tend to get lazy and boring.

Before I start my work in the morning, I need to have quickly browsed the entire paper, noting articles that I want to read during lunch.

Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. One hundred years from now, your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.