“Mr. White: If you get that story done, I’ll take steps to get you a new cushion for your chair.”
Harold Ross
more infosource: note written to E. B. White, encouraging him to finish an essay, and quoted in “A Note to Our Readers,” The New Yorker, October 4, 2010, 40.
category: cushion, deadline, E. B. White, incentive, story, work, writing
medium: letter
“I want my place! my own place! my true place in the world! my proper sphere! my thing to do, which nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my lifetime!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
more infosource: “The Intelligence Office,” in Mosses from an Old Manse Vol 2 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1882), 365.
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category: calling, identity, job, place, purpose, work
medium: fiction
“Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work.”
Ernest Hemingway
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 40.
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category: pencil, productive, routine, tool, work, writing
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 18 of The Paris Review, 1958.
“It’s important to me to have a place to work outside of where I live. So I have always found myself an office. I go off to work as if I had a clock to punch; at the end of the day I come home as if I had just gotten off the commuter train. I need to impose a structure on myself.”
Richard Price
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 383.
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category: clock, commute, habit, office, routine, structure, work, writing
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 138 of The Paris Review, 1996.
“Work: work doesn’t solve everything but when a person is practicing the work that he loves, you can always tell; there is a rhythm in their absorption which shows in the eyes; their eyes glitter with sights brought back from private places: when the right words come together the world becomes at that moment mathematically perfect: so with each stitch of the cobbler’s machine, the tailor’s needle. They are seeing unity, peace, in some tiny fragment of the world and they know that this fragment is themselves.”
Anaïs Nin
more infosource: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (vol 5, 1947–1955) (New York: First Harvest, 1975), 172.
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category: calling, flow, passion, work
medium: diary
“Blessed is the man who has found his work, blessed is the man to whom his work appeals with so much interest that he goes from it with a longing to be able to finish what he has been at, and comes back to it with a prospect that now he shall be able to accomplish what time and perhaps fatigue would not allow him to proceed with the day before.”
James Joseph Walsh
more infosource: The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries (New York: Catholic Summer School Press, 1907), 125.
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category: blessed, happiness, job, satisfaction, work
medium: nonfiction
notes: Thomas Carlyle wrote "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness." And Elbert Hubbard wrote "Blessed is that man who has found his work."
“No one I know has a job anymore. They’ve got Gigs.”
Tina Brown
more infosource: blog posting, “The Gig Economy,” www.dailybeast.com, January 12, 2009.
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category: economy, gig, job, work
medium: blog
“Doing beautiful things is its own reward. If you do something that you’re proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn’t there before—you can’t beat that.”
Raymond Joseph Teller
more infosource: “Penn and Teller Interview,” Telegraph, by Benjamin Secher, July 9, 2010.
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category: beauty, creativity, reward, satisfaction, work
medium: interview
notes: Silent half of the magic team Penn + Teller. He changed his legal name to Teller.
via: boingboing“When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.”
Alain de Botton
more infosource: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 78.
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category: delight, job, meaning, profession, satisfaction, suffering, work
medium: nonfiction
“People are people. And people are problems. But—and this is a very big but—people who are practiced in collaboration will do better than those who insist on their individuality.”
Twyla Tharp
more infosource: The Collaborative Habit, written with Jesse Kornbluth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 11.
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category: collaboration, cooperation, flexibility, success, work
medium: nonfiction
work