Frederick Banting Quotes

I thought administration was the running of the office. The Xerox machine. Paying bills.

I get up early and open my emails, write cheques, and answer the phone; whatever needs to be done.

There's always a great deal of business to be transacted in one's office. There are always visitors it seems to me, an unending stream of them, who come with letters of recommendation, or come actually on substantive business.

I've always been interested in the office. I was a secretary a long time ago, and I've always been into paperwork. My first secretarial job was 1965 or 1966.

I worked in an office. I was like an assistant. So, I would just answer phone calls, coordinate events. It was a great day job. I worked with amazing people, but obviously, whenever you are doing something that's not your dream, you kind of feel like, 'Oh, I'm on this grind.'

I work a lot and I like to get out and work but the work I do to make the other work work I'm not very good at.

My typical morning involves some time on the treadmill, but obviously I skip that a lot. Mostly, I wake up, check my email, then get to work on the various interviews and questions and phone calls that come with being an author.

There's always more demands than there's time to meet them, so it's constantly a matter of trying to balance them.

Now, there is no way to say how long some projects take, that's our principle.

Procrastination is probably my worst habit out of many. Especially when it comes to paperwork.

You talk to the real cops and they say ninety percent of it is paperwork.

I was an office secretary for a long time. A good secretary.

If I'm just at the White House, I have meetings in my office, I sign letters, I plan different things. Late in the afternoon, I'll quit working and wait for my husband to get home.

Work done by other people sounds easy. How hard can it be to take care of a newborn who sleeps 20 hours a day? How hard can it be to keep track of your billable hours? To travel for one night for business? To get a 4-year-old ready for school? To return a few phone calls? To load the dishwasher? To fill out some forms?

Are you laboring under the impression that I read these memoranda of yours? I can't even lift them.

Responsibility without power, the fate of the secretary through the ages.

[Describing the vice presidency:] ... inside work with no heavy lifting.

I don't play computer games. What I do is yell at my secretary and say, 'Go on the Internet, and find this or that.'

If all I did was answer the correspondence I get, that would be my job.

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

I was a pretty good academic proofreader, I just wasn't good at keeping up with the paperwork.

The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take. He becomes fussy about filing, keen on seeing that pencils are sharpened, eager to ensure that the windows are open (or shut) and apt to use two or three different-colored inks.

There were times in my life when I had one thing to do all day, but I still couldn’t get to it. “I gotta go to the post office, but I’d probably have to put on pants. And they’re only open till five. Looks like I’m going to have to do that next week.

I have to take care of the house, and the dogs, and the Macondo Board meetings, all those e-mails, the letters that are going to fans. And you've got to pay bills. These things eat up your time. You have to prepare and pack to go on that trip. Then when you come back you have to file all that stuff, answer all that mail, and that's not even washing the clothes or any of that. So it takes as many days as I've been away to come back to normal and to get quiet.

Most people spend most of their time on low-priority busywork because it requires no additional knowledge, skills, or imagination-or courage. In a word, it's easier.