Will Self Quotes

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.

I'm just a lazy boy. I'd rather sit in my recliner and act.

There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time.

There's a lot to be said for loafing if you know how to do it gracefully.

Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries.

Idleness is an appendix to nobility.

I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy.

In Africa, we filled up all available time busily doing not much, and then we wasted the rest.

If I could stay in a dressing gown all day I would.

I'm definitely the lazy one in the family.

It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things; or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."

Writing is busy idleness.

I don't know anything that gives me greater pleasure, or profit either, than talking or listening to philosophy. But when it comes to ordinary conversation, such as the stuff you talk about financiers and the money market, well, I find it pretty tiresome personally, and I feel sorry that my friends should think they're being very busy when they're really doing absolutely nothing. Of course, I know your idea of me: you think I'm just a poor unfortunate, and I shouldn't wonder if your right. But then I dont THINK that you're unfortunate - I know you are.

Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.

My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.

My passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fiber all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this sight of faintness - if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor - but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibers of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.

Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.

There's a lot of hurry up and wait. But it gives you time to write a song.

O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish.

Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.

A lot of philosophy is bull***t, but a lot of it is what we write songs about too. And it's organizing your thoughts, organizing your intellect.

The devil finds work for idle hands.