Quotes on Work

People work in the system. Management creates the system

All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.

It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

I couldn't play ball. I couldn't dance. Luckily, the girls didn't want me. Not much I could do about that. So I started to draw and to write. By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me.

Authorities that erect major obstacles to migration - or place severe restrictions on migrants' work opportunities - inflict needless economic self-harm, as they impose barriers to having their labor needs met in an orderly, legal fashion. Worse still, they unintentionally encourage illegal migration.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there's no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something. I can't think of an exception to that.

The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.

When you talk about 'doing the work', that's the work I'm interested in. What can I contribute as a human being?

Work is what structures adults' lives: it gives us purpose, focus, a set of responsibilities, and an identity. So when people are not participating in the labour market, all sorts of other things often start to go wrong.

When I write, I feel like an optometrist, constantly flipping between lenses and asking, 'Is this better? Is this?' Slowly, the work comes into focus.

Even though what I do does enter the market, it doesn't interest me. I am exclusively concerned with the formal qualities of my work. It is about the need and the right to self-expression.

As technology increasingly takes over knowledge-based work, the cognitive skills that are central to today's education systems will remain important; but behavioral and non-cognitive skills necessary for collaboration, innovation, and problem solving will become essential as well.

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.

Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.

However varied you try to make your work, you still bump up against the end of you. You keep knocking into a wall, and the wall is your own skull. But when you adapt somebody's work, it's like a door into somewhere else. It feels like a holiday from myself.

I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.