Short cuts make long delays.

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.

It’s what counts, isn’t it, on the Sunday, rather than pre-season testing. If you lock up, you do a little mistake, it’s nothing, but if you do it on Sunday, you lose a place or you have to box for a flat spot or something like that. It’s a much bigger problem.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

I’m very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories.

Why should I stop working? If I do, I’ll die and it’ll all be finished.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

I’m kind of fascist with myself, you know.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

As a single withered tree, if set aflame, causes a whole forest to burn, so does a rascal son destroy a whole family.

The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.

You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

Lost time is never found again.

I didn’t work hard to sit down and not work.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

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.

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

When I get on a roll with something, it’s really hard for me to put it down unfinished.

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

Either you run the day or the day runs you.

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

Tomorrow is nothing, today is too late; the good lived yesterday.

It takes me about two hours to run into Target. People always want a picture. They hem and haw, and they can’t spit the words out, so they waste about five minutes of my time just standing there getting ready for a picture. Just do it!

I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don’t believe too much into inspiration, only I’m waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It’s a little too easy to say that.

In twenty years I’ve never had a day when I didn’t have to think about someone else’s needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

I have a little bit of that gamer spirit in me. I just don’t have the time to be a gamer. But in another life, I would be one.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

I realize I don’t do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.

Never confuse motion with action.

When I was in my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

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.

I don’t have time to be lonely. And I get fearful of relationships because I feel guilty about wanting someone to be completely faithful and loyal, when I can’t even give them 10 percent of the attention that they need. It’s just the reality of my time, my life, my schedule.

90 percent of my time is spent on 10 percent of the world.

My goals are so high that I don’t have time to relax in any way, shape or form.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

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.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

One of the best mental disciplines for people to implement is simply putting together a schedule or a task list and actually executing it. Write the list or the schedule the night before, and then do what you said you would do. Life becomes much better when you do that.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

This is Sunday, and the question arises, what’ll I start tomorrow?

The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology, horribly used. The problem is not technology. The problem is the person or persons using it.

Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy.

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.

That’s one of the biggest things. Never being home, always traveling, having different interests and focusing on different things, just the time aspect of going back home and seeing them, you don’t have that at all. It was a big sacrifice but, at the end of the day, it was worth it.

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

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.