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When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.

Tom Hodgkinson

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Tom Hodgkinson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Newcastle
Sleep
Mercenary
Take
Catchy
Going
Naps
Librarian
Gym
Chocolate
Tough
Gets
Senility

More quotes by Tom Hodgkinson

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The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Laziness works. And the simple way to incorporate its health benefits into your life is simply to take a nap.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up.
Tom Hodgkinson
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We have an idea that if something we're doing isn't actually earning money, or spending it, then it's completely worthless. But if you start to work less, you can actually start to give more to society, but on a local level.
Tom Hodgkinson
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The best thing that can happen to anybody is to be sacked or made redundant because often that's when you think, I don't want to become one of the living dead. I haven't got anything to lose, now I can start to follow my own dreams.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.
Tom Hodgkinson
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My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they're over-worked.
Tom Hodgkinson
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There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11 a.m.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own I hate them with a passion.
Tom Hodgkinson
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One of the least arduous but most productive of gardening jobs, the magic of deadheading never fails to delight me. It was a revelation when the principle was explained to me: that flowers are the attempt by the plant to reproduce itself. So if you cut the heads off before the flower turns into seeds, the plant will continue to flower.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Deleting 200 spams a day is a drag. And I was checking my email constantly, rather than getting on with my real work, which is reading and writing. Email was becoming a distraction, a burden rather than a liberation.
Tom Hodgkinson
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When walking you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder.
Tom Hodgkinson
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If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.
Tom Hodgkinson
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A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Faffing is good. It is an important part of life. Faffing is when we disconnect from the matrix and idle for a while, like a car. Our body and spirit know deep down that human beings were not made for constant toil so subconsciously creates space through the mechanism of faffing.
Tom Hodgkinson