top of page
Exlpore more Work quotes

"The job description, like most, used complicated words that made job-hopefuls hesitant to apply because it may be out of their range of capability."

"We are so used to working that not working is the new hard work."

"The office' is a cemetery of dreams."

"Speaking about work isn't working."

"I didn't want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank."

"The summit of Mauna Kea was definitely a place where it was better to be a hard to replace skilled engineer than an easy to replace technician. It was my experience that once you had developed Mauna Kea Sickness that the management team would blatantly harass you out of your job using nasty inhumane human resources techniques."

"Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes him."

"Wherever you work, work hard and educate yourself continuously. You must never forget social welfare, ethics and honesty. However, there is no guarantee for your career progression. Therefore, don't expect that only the best people will be promoted."

"And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain."
Explore more quotes by Donald E. Westlake

"If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all."

"If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers."

"When Stark isn't off sulking somewhere, or whatever he's doing when he won't return my calls, I alternate between the two. That usually works well, though occasionally an idea for the wrong guy drifts through my mind."

"A friend of mine, now retired, was then a major exec at a major bank, and one of her jobs, the last four years, was the farewell interview."

"The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed."

"Once he became a series character, I made the conscious choice that he would never act like a series character, never wink at the reader, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me."

"Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder."
bottom of page