The Best Decline Letter of All Time: Edmund Wilson - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

Refusal requires a degree of latitude—a margin—enjoyed at the level of the individual (being able to personally afford the consequences) and at the level of society (whose legal attitude toward noncompliance may vary).

position at Harvard that would have allowed him to write poetry for a living, but he turned it down to stay in his insurance job.

he preferred to cut down his expenses to zero in the name of something truly valuable: his time.

“Irresponsibility requires eternal vigilance,” Feynman told the Los Angeles Times in a 1986 profile. “And I failed! I wasn’t careful enough when this presidential commission thing came up. I flunked my own principle.” A plan to simply become too unpleasant to be bothered, it seems, isn’t sustainable. There are only so many times you can offer an un

As the writer Edmund Wilson put it, “Death is one prophecy that never fails.”

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel like 4 or 5 hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day.