Top 100 Serious Work Quotes
#1. On email and the first instance of spam: This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!
Vinton Cerf
#2. To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#3. I see no difference between my pictures that people consider amusing and the rest. To me, it's all serious work - they're just a reaction to what I see. I don't leave this apartment in the morning and say to myself 'Today I'm going to be funny and tomorrow I'm going to be sad.'
Elliott Erwitt
#4. I've been a writer for 42 years and, yes, it is a full time job for me. Not a hobby, but serious work.
Donald McKay
#5. All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.
Benjamin Franklin
#6. I'm not sure many writers are trying to reconcile all the things that are separated in our culture - body and mind, urban and pastoral, lyricism and hardboiled, men and women, joy and grief. I tried to do quite a lot, but I wanted to create a serious work of literature.
Nicola Griffith
#7. I could call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.
James Joyce
#8. Raising people is not some lark. It's serious work with serious repercussions. It's air-traffic control. You can't step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.
Kelly Corrigan
#9. I took 'Grease' to play my trump card, my voice, and get attention that would lead to auditions for serious work like 'Angels in America.' But I backed myself into a corner with 'Grease,' and it took me 17 years to get out.
Billy Porter
#10. Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.
Colm Toibin
#11. He only seems to me to live, and to make proper use of life, who sets himself some serious work to do, and seeks the credit of a task well and skillfully performed.
Sallust
#12. Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.
Joyce Carol Oates
#13. I usually balance out autobiography with goofy, amusing stuff to help keep the humour in my more serious work.
Jeffrey Brown
#14. Consciously and unconsciously, an artist engaged in serious work is always raising or dealing with the question, 'What really matters?'
Freeman Patterson
#15. If no one wants to jump into a Kim Weston and drive it down the street. That's fine with me I don't care. I know my work is good and I know it's serious work.
Kim Weston
#16. In my serious work I am striving for the essence of things and for goals which are possibly unobtainable. On the other hand, everything humorous has great attraction for me, and a childish streak leads me into all kinds of frivolous endeavour.
Philippe Halsman
#17. Often a purple patch or two is tacked on to a serious work of high promise, to give an effect of colour.
Horace
#18. Before the cook arrived when she stood in a space no wider than a bench is long, back behind and to the left of the milk cans. Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.
Toni Morrison
#19. I'm positive and I smile a lot, and I'm kind of a banana, but serious work just seems to find me, so I'm not going to argue with it.
Mireille Enos
#20. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.
George Orwell
#21. The philosopher is not an apologist; apologetic concern, as Karl Barth (the one living theologian of unquestionable genius) has rightly insisted, is the death of serious theologizing, and I would add, equally of serious work in the philosophy of religion.
Donald M. MacKinnon
#22. Serious work gets done ... in congenial surroundings, which tend to make you laugh.
Ian McDiarmid
#23. Choosing to laugh doesn't undermine the serious work we have to do. It enables us to do it.
Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
#24. If my name was on a serious work like this it would never get fair treatment. They would all say I had tried to be funny and failed.
Jerome K. Jerome
#25. One thing I did not want to change, even if we got serious, work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two at a time.
Yvon Chouinard
#26. The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don't worry.
Ernest Hemingway,
#27. Doodling serves as a means of keeping the hand or fingers limber, so that they are always ready for serious work.
Charles E. Burchfield
#28. Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
Pablo Picasso
#29. If you think I'm trying to scare you, then my seduction skills need serious work. Besides, I don't need fear to control you anymore. My cock is pretty good at making you do what I want.
B.B. Reid
#30. I want to make serious work that engages with serious subjects. I'm very lucky: I get to more or less make what I want.
Scott Rudin
#31. The only time anyone has ever gotten into serious trouble was when he decided he could do nothing about something.
L. Ron Hubbard
#32. I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.
Isaac Marion
#33. He's always checking out your arse."
Kevin's laugh died on it's way up his throat. "Are you serious? Shit, I need to work on my gaydar."
"No, you don't." Cedric folded his arms over his chest. "I'm gay and I want you. That's all you need to know.
Taylor V. Donovan
#34. By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
Gore Vidal
#35. I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
Truman Capote
#36. Play is the work of children. It's very serious stuff.
Bob Keeshan
#37. Serious writers pretend they don't care about film adaptations of their work, but it's a colossal lie: We all care.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#38. I try to deal with my serious reading before work.
Donna Shalala
#39. New York is so serious about the creation of work. Everything is happening so fast, it feels like there's another studio, another session on every block, and I love that.
Diplo
#40. Jesus, he wasn't a dick, he was an asshole and he had some serious fucking work to do. "She
Kristen Ashley
#41. In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen.
Oscar Wilde
#42. If only one fifth of your spells work you have real power. If only one fifth of your divinations work you have a serious disability.
Peter J. Carroll
#43. I am a serious artist in my own right, in the sense that I've spent my entire life being an artist and trying to be an artist and making work.
David Shrigley
#44. Ethan: "Abstaining definitely doesn't work."
Beth: "what do you suggest?"
Ethan: "We're obviously going to have to make love often, but keep the encounters from getting too intense." He sounded perfectly serious, like he really believed what he was saying.
Lucy Monroe
#45. The Phil Spector that I would meet has always been a nice, quiet, little guy who's very serious about his work; obviously you can tell that because each and everything he's ever done has always been charted.
Ben E. King
#46. Because we are in a war situation, this can sometimes be dangerous work. But guys like A.D. Flowers and his technicians just take it in stride and get on with the job. In four years, we've never had a serious accident or injury working with all the explosions.
Vic Morrow
#47. I have never seen a client make a serious effort to confront his abusiveness unless somebody required him to do the work. The abuser who truly enters counseling voluntarily, with no one holding anything over his head, quits within a few sessions, unless he finds a counselor he can manipulate.
Lundy Bancroft
#48. It has made me realise how many doors open for you when you're up for an Oscar. It seems once you are nominated, it validates you as a serious director, and you become someone that people want to work with.
Daniel Barber
#49. With your votes you are working for your future. It is not a holiday; it is the most serious day of work since you were born. Better to come in clothing dirty from work than with your soul filthy from having sold your right to justice.
Luis Munoz Marin
#50. I never took the work less than serious, my work ethic is ingrained in me. But I've always had a sense of humor about myself.
George Hamilton
#51. I don't think I've had to change anything, really, apart from being more serious and focussed on my drive. One thing I've realised is that you get out what you put in and because of that my work rate has increased ten fold.
Tinie Tempah
#52. If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.
Wendell Berry
#54. To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
Robertson Davies
#55. It's not that I'm a serious person; I'm playful and stuff like that, but I take characters very seriously and the work very seriously.
Bryce Dallas Howard
#56. Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying, true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which flesh and blood do not relish.
E. M. Bounds
#57. I like to work. I don't like to disrupt my equilibrium. I don't like to change my head. I'd rather be a third-rate actor. It's a job, and I'm dedicated in my way. I enjoy it. I'm serious about it. But if it doesn't come off, I'm not going to die.
Anthony Hopkins
#58. Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.
Fred Rogers
#59. I'm a real paradox. Because I'm a very serious person, and I take my work very seriously. But I wrap it up in a court jester and a clown and make people laugh and make them feel good about themselves.
Richard Simmons
#60. Damn you, Anaxantis. You and your brother were supposed to sit on your princely asses, organize the occasional banquet, use your high sounding titles to ravish the local girls, or boys, or sheep, whatever takes your fancy for all I care, and leave serious matters to your elders.
Andrew Ashling
#61. This impeccably researched study of the classic black insult game may be the funniest work of serious scholarship ever published.
Terry Teachout
#62. an arsenal of serious tools that needed to be sworn at to work properly.
C. Bard Cole
#63. To justify our likes and dislikes, we generally say that the work we dislike is not serious.
Walter Sickert
#64. When you come to actually act, it's a game. It may be a very serious game, but it's still a game. If you lose that sense of play, the work suffers.
Michael Sheen
#65. We may yet work up to some serious shooting war, or maybe some acts of urban genocide committed with rogue nuclear weapons. But if that were the case, why would we call that '9/11'? If Washington disappeared in a mushroom cloud, we'd give that huge event a different name.
Bruce Sterling
#66. To be serious, if we were only interested in earning big money then a politician would have to go and work in industry.
Angela Merkel
#67. In a serious sense, wanting to change something from the past doesn't work for me - change something you don't enjoy now rather than regretting it later.
Rory McIlroy
#68. I'm counting on that," Mila murmurs as she steps away. "I just need some time Pax; time for you to show that you are serious about this, about putting the work in. That's all I need.
Courtney Cole
#69. Chess is not for the faint-hearted; it absorbs a person entirely. To get to the bottom of this game, he has to give himself up into slavery. Chess is difficult, it demands work, serious reflection and zealous research.
Wilhelm Steinitz
#70. As I get older, I'm slowing down and, yes, calming down in my desire to be taken seriously. That I can be entertaining and funny and high nervous energy can work against me as a serious composer, slowly but surely you'll see me be quieter just so that people will listen.
Marvin Hamlisch
#71. I feel like 'Work' was a really good song for people to get to know me, as it's obviously biographical. With 'Bounce,' I wanted to make sure people know there's a fun side to me as well as the somber and serious one.
Iggy Azalea
#72. I'm serious. I don't know how you work like that. My school shit is better organized, and I'm not in the business of World Domination.
Zadie Smith
#73. I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.
Kevin Barry
#74. My dad drank pretty heavily, and he never missed a day of work in his life. So I never looked at drinking as a serious problem, but drugs to me are a serious problem. I think it's a generational thing. I think older people don't feel as uncomfortable around drinkers as they do around dopers.
Alex Trebek
#75. Rejection sucks. It sucks every time, whether it's a big suck or a little suck. But it's part of the process. It's part of being a writer. It's a badge that says 'I'm serious about this, and I'm sending out my work.
Allison K. Williams
#76. Corn ethanol can help in the short term, but it has serious limitations, and none of this is going to work if we don't dramatically improve the efficiency of our cars and trucks.
David Friedman
#77. But I think it would be irresponsible for me not to say what I really believe in my heart to be true - that there are some serious inequities that we face as women and that we can work to address these inequities.
Anita Hill
#78. A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#79. When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have to do.
John Scalzi
#80. As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.
Emmet Gowin
#81. My dreams for the future are simple: work, a happy, healthy family, a lovely long motorcycle ride, and continuing the struggle to awaken people to the need for serious human rights reform.
Mike Farrell
#82. I don't play fantasy baseball anymore now because it's too much work, and I feel like I have to hold myself up to such a high standard. I'm pretty serious about my fantasy football, though.
Nate Silver
#83. Journalists aren't supposed to praise things. It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something.
P. J. O'Rourke
#84. The 80/20 Principle, like the truth, can make you free. You can work less. At the same time, you can earn more and enjoy more. The only price is that you need to do some serious 80/20 thinking.
Richard Koch
#85. While Max appears to greatly admire Wallace as a writer and feel compassion for him as a man, he is never starry-eyed, or pulls his punches. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is as illuminating, multifaceted, and serious an estimation of David Foster Wallace's life and work as we can hope to find.
Elissa Schappell
#86. Chronicler froze. 'So you're saying I work for you?'
'I'm saying you belong to me.' Bast's face was deadly serious. 'Down to the marrow of your bones.
Patrick Rothfuss
#87. But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn's 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn's 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.
Aaron Copland
#88. The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut
#89. Serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with style because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses. Their work arose rather in defiance of their times.
Franz Marc
#90. Within your sphere of responsibility you have as serious an obligation as do I within my sphere of responsibility. Each of us should be determined to build the kingdom of God on the earth and to further the work of righteousness.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#91. If you don't think there is any value in the work I, or any other serious journalists do, then don't spend your money on it. At least you have the choice.
Heather Brooke
#92. My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.
Fidel Castro
#93. I believe that - if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression - that you should take on this work like a holy calling
Elizabeth Gilbert
#94. I do everything I watch, whether it's like a big comic book film that I've done or something very serious and raw.I do have that initial feeling like I'm the worst, this is awful, my work is - I've let everybody down. I definitely have that.
Eva Mendes
#95. I couldn't write a happy movie or romantic comedy to save my life. Yes, Noel Coward's an idol, but his plays are serious to me. 'Private Lives' and 'Design for Living' both have an edge. Without psychoanalyzing myself, I think I exorcise my demons in my work.
John Logan
#96. It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
John Irving
#97. When I have had a long day at work, I want something to watch that is funny, lighthearted and easy to get into, and reality is that. I'm not really into serious programmes or documentaries.
Amy Childs
#98. Writing is hard work, not magic. It begins with deciding why you are writing and whom you are writing for. What is your intent? What do you want the reader to get out of it? What do you want to get out of it. It's also about making a serious time commitment and getting the project done.
Suze Orman
#99. My philosophy of life is that I am deeply, deeply serious about my work and for the rest I like to have a few laughs.
Maggi Hambling
#100. I think, clearly, we got to work closely with China to resolve the serious problems we have, and I worry about Putin and his military adventurism in the Crimea and the Ukraine.
Bernie Sanders
