“In America there is so much pressure about work, work, work, that it gets into your bones without your realizing it. It is a most unhealthy atmosphere. Work is very bad for you if too frequently engaged in.”
—Geogre Sanders
“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.”
Posted in inspiration, quotes, work
“Office civilization could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.”
—Alain De Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
“Most of my days involve four- and five-hour stretches of what I would characterize as dicking around on the Internet.”
—Jesse Thorn, Fast Company, June 2011
(See also Mike Monteiro’s “Fuck You, Pay Me” talk.)
Tom Waits in Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
From Elizabeth Gilbert’s June 2002 GQ profile of Tom Waits:
“‘Children make up the best songs, anyway,’ he says. ‘Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.’ This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song ‘really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.’ ‘Some songs,’ he has learned, ‘don’t want to be recorded.’ You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes ‘is trying to trap birds.’ Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like ‘digging potatoes out of the ground.’ Others are sticky and weird, like ‘gum found under an old table.’ Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful ‘to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.’ Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you ‘like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.”
(Article via Austin Kleon.)
Further listening: Radiolab’s “Help!”
Austin Kleon’s simple list of 10 things he wishes he’d heard when he was in college.
Required reading.
Posted in art, endorsements, inspiration, work
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
(Via Swiss Miss.)
“Technology acts as a salve on our communal doubt. ‘Will they like me?’ ‘Will I be accepted?’ ‘Are my teeth white enough?’ ‘Buy this and you’re OK!’ Can you imagine Picasso asking, ‘Will they like this painting?’ Or Van Gogh saying, ‘Will they understand what I’m doing?’ Those guys were like, ‘Fuck you, I got something to do. I have an idea. I don’t care what you think. Thick paint, you don’t like it? Then get the fuck out of here!’”
—Melvin Sokolsky, Wraparound Magazine 1.4 (2004): 16.
Posted in art, inspiration, technology, work
“There is no one who has no leisure time at all. The office is not a permanent sanctuary, and Sundays are an institution. Thus, in principle, during those beautiful hours of free time everyone would have the opportunity to rouse himself into real boredom. But although one wants to do nothing, things are done to one: the world makes sure that one does not find oneself. And even if one perhaps isn’t interested in it, the world itself is much too interested for one to find the peace and quiet necessary to be as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves.”
—Siegfried Kracauer, “Boredom” (1924)
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