Monday Morning Quote – Agatha Christie on the Perks of Laziness

It’s already the second week of the New Year. Have you managed to stick to your resolutions so far? Here at CSOFT, we’re trying our best to do just that, which means that it’s time again for a Monday Morning Quote—on time and prettily adorned for your reading pleasure. Today’s quote is by the best-selling novelist of all time, Dame Agatha Christie, who is especially remembered for her quirky if not meddlesome literary sleuths, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness—to save oneself trouble. - Agatha Christie The Queen of Crime

A bit of background information on Christie’s affinity for laziness: in her autobiography, Christie herself talks about how her father was a lazy man, having grown up in a time of what she refers to as “independent incomes” in Great Britain. Essentially, her father was a well-to-do American stockbroker who was more suited to playing whist at the club than strapping on the ol’ work boots. This idleness among upper-middle class people is a recurring, almost romanticized theme in a number of her crime novels.

In spite of her fondness for inactivity, Agatha Christie has set a number of impressive records in her lifetime (and even after). Some of the more noteworthy ones include:

• Best-selling novelist of all time—having sold roughly four billion copies of her novels, only second to the Bible in total sales.

• Most translated author—her work having been translated into 103 different languages.

Agatha Christie also recently (and posthumously) won the Guinness World Record for the thickest book. The Complete Miss Marple, a collection of all Marple-related stories and novels, is 4,032 pages long, and is a whopping 12.6 inches (32 cm) thick. Yowza. According to the Guinness World Records website, in this giant collection, “43 murders are solved: 12 poisonings; six strangulations; two drownings; two stabbings; a burning; one blow to the head; one death by an arrow and two people pushed.”

We don’t know about you, but that’s the coolest start to a Monday we’ve had in a long time. So what do you think: is it possible to be a lazy multi-billionaire?

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