Bill McKibben Quotes

The problem with binge-watching on Netflix is that you lose three days of your life.

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.

I'd say I watch a fair amount of TV, but I'm not a TV addict by any means.

I stopped watching television like a fiend once I got into college.

I've been lucky enough to be too busy for TV because if I'm not, I'll get stuck in front of it.

While television is a good servant, it's a bad master. It can swallow up huge quantities of our lives without much happiness bang for the buck.

I'm not ashamed to say I love television. I put the TV on, and my brain switches off, and I just sit there for a few hours.

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

If I'm not in the dead heat of working on something, I can end up spending tons and tons of time on the Web, and I hate it. I feel the same shame I did in grad school when I was pretty much addicted to reruns of 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'. I wish someone would make the Web just go away. Just remove it from the earth.

I always think I should try to get to bed early, but then I can't stop myself from watching telly and fiddling around on the net.

I'm a TV junkie.

I have a healthy addiction to binge-watching TV.

I am so busy with my family and my serials I don't get time to watch other serials.

People are medicated and TV is one of the things that they are medicated with.

Someone once defined hard work as the accumulation of the easy things you didn't do when you should have.

Avoiding depression with large daily doses of television.

I teach that people should watch less TV. I don't care what else they're doing! The average American's watching anywhere from three to six hours a day. If you watch six hours of TV a day, that's 15 years of your life!

He was beastly tired, but it was hard to stop. One more book, he had told himself, then I'll stop. One more folio, just one more. One more page, then I'll go up and rest and get a bite to eat. But there was always another page after that one, and another after that, and another book waiting underneath the pile. I'll just take a quick peek to see what this one is about, he'd think, and before he knew he would be halfway through it.

It is so very easy and so very pleasant, too, to read only books which lead to nothing, light and interesting books, and the more the better, that it is almost as difficult to wean ourselves from it as from the habit of chewing tobacco to excess, or of smoking the whole time, or of depending for stimulus upon tea or coffee or spirits.

The more you pursue distractions, the less effective any particular distraction is, and so I'd had to up various dosages, until, before I knew it, I was checking my e-mail every ten minutes, and my plugs of tobacco were getting ever larger, and my two drinks a night had worsened to four, and I'd achieved such deep mastery of computer solitaire that my goal was no longer to win a game but to win two or more games in a row--a kind of meta-solitaire whose fascination consisted not in playing the cards but in surfing the streaks of wins and losses.

Better laid than never.

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.

When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around.

I somehow always have this idea that as soon as I can get through this work that's piled up ahead of me, I'll really write a beautiful thing. But I never do. I always have the idea that someday, somehow, I'll be living a beautiful life.

In the past, people said I wasn't focused and didn't give it the time. That's a bunch of crap. I'm not doing anything different now than I did before.