"Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away."
— Robert Maynard Hutchins

"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble."
— Agatha Christie

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness."
— David Dunham

"Sometimes I do smart things. Sometimes I do dumb things. Most of the time I don't do anything."
— Gorilla Rising Hintz

"'You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you...'

[...]

'Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.'"
— Alfred Bester (The Stars My Destination)

"I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
— Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study In Scarlet)

"Laziness is the first step towards efficiency."
— Patrick Bennett

"As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly."
— Paul Rudnick

"Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness."
— Albert Camus (L'etranger)

"I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison."
— Daniil Kharms (Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms)

"We revel in the laxness of the path we take."
— Charles Baudelaire

"Please don't wake me, no, don't shake me, leave me where I am, I'm only sleeping..."
— John Lennon

"So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those that stood still said he went backward and should be killed. And the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were all fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools were called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did not get enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much."
— Jack London (To Build a Fire and Other Stories)