Work Quotes - Page 6

Your special spiritual gifts and talents are your calling.

Don't always seek the approval of others concerning your goals or dreams. Not everyone wants to see you succeed, just because they are not successful.

Work, love, courage and hope,
Make me good and help me cope!

I used to work at the unemployment office. I hated it, because when they fired me, I had to show up to work anyway.

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

Rich will be my life if I
can keep my memories full
and brimming, and record
them on clear-eyed
mornings while I set
joyously to work setting
pen to holy craft.

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page.

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.

My mum and dad had worked incredibly hard to afford me an education.

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Directing the mind to stay in the present can be a formidable task.

Saying of the Prophet
Food
Nobody has eaten better food than that won by his own labour.

We must not be defined by what we do, but we must be what and who we are, then only happen to do what we do!

Your environment will eat your goals and plans for breakfast.

Do not do what you cannot continue to deliver.
For, remember, the world wants to see a continuity of delivery of
set standards...!