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All Quotes by author - Tom Hodgkinson

" All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life. "

" All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets. "

" Alongside my 'no email' policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too. "

" Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own, I hate them with a passion. "

" Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg? "

" As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice. "

" Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work. "

" Being lazy does not mean that you do not create. In fact, lying around doing nothing is an important, nay crucial, part of the creative process. It is meaningless bustle that actually gets in the way of productivity. All we are really saying is, give peace a chance. "

" Bosses should sanction the nap rather than expect workers to power on all day without repose. They might even find that workers' happiness - or what management types refer to as 'employee satisfaction results' - might improve. "

" Both on an individual and a national scale, debt imprisons. "

" Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on. "

" 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. "

" Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work? "

" 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. "

" Facebook is not ideologically neutral. In fact, it emerges from a very particular world view which we can trace back to Hobbes. I discovered this by examining the profile of Zuckerberg's fellow board members who, unlike him, are a very interesting bunch and, I suspect, the real power behind the poster boy. "

" Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back. "

" 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. "

" Faffing, of course, does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens. "

" Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with. "

" For a really relaxing time, you want to go to a place where the work ethic hasn't taken hold, where the culture hasn't been taken over by the western values of constant striving. "

" I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder. "

" Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure. "

" If we are to make life into a pleasure rather than a struggle, then I would suggest that we have to start with our own mental attitudes. "

" If you can find a way to make a living doing something you enjoy, or a range of things that you enjoy, then it can scarcely be called work. "

" 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. "

" If your work is done on the phone, then surely you can set up some kind of wireless system. If your work involves reading or writing reports, then this too could be done outside. "

" I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets. "

" I'm not sure if I could bear to go on an aeroplane again. It's not my concern for the welfare of the planet. It's not even the long check-in times and queuing. No, it's the humiliation of the security process that has finally done it for me. "

" In both word and deed, one of the greatest idlers of all time was John Lennon. In his songs we see repeated defences of simply lying around doing nothing. "

" Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries. "

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