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)