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I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic!

Tom Hodgkinson

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Tom Hodgkinson
Age: 57
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Newcastle
Something
Hey
Lazy
Idiot
Fantastic
Suddenly
Idler
Creative
Idlers
Process
Realised
Part
Aspire

More quotes by Tom Hodgkinson

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Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg?
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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.
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It takes a while to master the art of hammock-lounging. At first I could only manage five minutes or so before I thought I ought to get out and go and help a child learn how to swim or something. But after observing the Mexicans' capability for staring into space for hours on end, I decided to put in some proper practice.
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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.
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Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.
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What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane experiences which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Life is about recapturing lost freedoms.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?
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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I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.
Tom Hodgkinson
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One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?
Tom Hodgkinson
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There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time.
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.
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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.
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We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.
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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