One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

William Faulkner (1897-1962) American novelist

Interview (1956, Spring), by Jean Stein, “The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review, No. 12
    (Source)

Collected in Malcom Cowley (ed.), Writers at Work (1958)