“What would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?”
“Type faster.”
Isaac Asimov — Quote Investigator
Isaac Asimov wrote more than 500 books in his lifetime. Five hundred. Science fiction, popular science, detective stories, guides to the Bible and Shakespeare: he wrote about everything. When people asked him about the secret of his productivity, he answered simply: “I type.”
This quote is not bravado and not dark humor. It is the manifesto of a man who found his thing. For Asimov, writing was not work that had to be endured, but life itself. He did not divide time into “work” and “rest”; he simply wrote because he couldn’t help it.
In an age when we are taught work-life balance and how to “switch off from work,” Asimov’s story sounds almost heretical. But maybe the whole trick is to find something you do not want to switch off from.
