It’s tough to go to sleep at night, and I wake up after five hours because I feel like I’m wasting time. I just sit up at night and think about what I can do next.

I wonder how many decisions we make every day. I believe it’s probably hundreds. We decide whether or not to get out of bed, what we’ll eat, what we’ll do, what we’ll think about, what we’ll say… and on and on.

My strong point, if I have a strong point, is performance. I always do more than I say. I always produce more than I promise.

I had a period in my life where I decided that I would never be bored again and that, if I had any free time at all, I would make plans, and I would always be doing things. It actually was great for a year or so, but then I lost all of my friends.

I’ve been on a calendar, but I’ve never been on time.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Before I went to jail, I was active in politics as a member of South Africa’s leading organization – and I was generally busy from 7 A.M. until midnight. I never had time to sit and think.

Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.

Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don’t complain.

How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.

I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king’s business.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‚in denial‘ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

Character is the result of two things: mental attitude and the way we spend our time.

Just on a practical side, if you wake up early in the morning – like at 4:30 in the morning – you’re going to have some free time to yourself to make things happen, to take care of things that are important to you.

Women in particular need to keep an eye on their physical and mental health, because if we’re scurrying to and from appointments and errands, we don’t have a lot of time to take care of ourselves. We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‚to do‘ list.

If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.

It’s not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?

I realized why directors are such horrible people – in a way – because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you, and there is no time to be nice to people, no time to be delicate.

People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.

Have fun in your command. Don’t always run at a breakneck pace. Take leave when you’ve earned it, spend time with your families.

Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.

Tardiness often robs us opportunity, and the dispatch of our forces.

Nothing extraordinary happens to a cricketer if you time his career – which is very short.

The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.

The truth is, anyone can start projects. The world is full of just-started projects that looked great at the time but were never completed.

Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.

When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

I am invariably late for appointments – sometimes as much as two hours. I’ve tried to change my ways but the things that make me late are too strong, and too pleasing.

I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, ‚He is not a lush.‘ That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, ‚Look!‘

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.

You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.

I believe you never get tired by doing work. You get tired when you don’t work. When you clean your house, you don’t get tired; it gives you satisfaction.

It is even better to act quickly and err than to hesitate until the time of action is past.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.

I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

I’m a lad of the ’60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

A man is not paid for having a head and hands, but for using them.

The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day. The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win – you pass the test.

If you try and work out at 4:30 in the afternoon, how many people are going to chip away at that time? Your boss, your job, your work, your family, your other obligations that you might have. At 4:30 in the morning, all those people are asleep, so you can do whatever you want.

I have no time to think about other writers. I am too busy with my own problems.

If I was to go to sleep before midnight, I would feel weird about myself, like I wasted a day. My most productive hours are between midnight and five.

On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.

Better never than late.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.