Book: Write Time: Guide to the Creative Process, from Vision through Revision-and Beyond
Quotes of Book: Write Time: Guide to the
Norman Cousins, author of Anatomy of an Illness and The Healing Heart, divides the human race into "positive" and "negative" people: The positive people work miracles, accounting for the evolution of human performance. I add another division, productive and nonproductive people: those who can do things and those who only talk about things {especially talk about why they can't do things}. As far back as I can remember, I was determined to contribute something, to be productive, and I've always questioned those who-though they may know much-go through life without making a mental contribution to the species: "If I live, I ought to speak my mind." Productive people have a love affair with time, with all of love's ups and downs. They get more from time than others, seem to know how to use time much better than nonproductive people-so much so that they can waste immense quantities of time and still be enormously creative and productive. One of my favorite examples is John Peabody Harrington, the great anthropologist of the American Southwest. At the time of his death, Harrington's field notes filled a basement of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and several rented warehouses in the Washington suburbs were needed for the overflow. Yet Carobeth Laird, his wife and Harrington's biographer, called him one of the greatest wasters of time she'd ever known-and said he felt the same way about himself. book-quote
