Life & Wisdom Quote by Leslie Charteris

Charteris turns self-deprecation into a craft manifesto, smuggling a working writer's discipline inside a joke about sloth. Calling himself "so lazy" is a sly feint: it disarms the reader, frames austerity as temperament rather than virtue, then quietly asserts a professional standard. The line is built on a comic paradox. Laziness suggests carelessness; "economical to the point of miserliness" suggests obsessive control. By yoking them, he recasts economy not as high-minded minimalism but as a pragmatic strategy: if you're going to spend effort at all, you spend it where it counts.

The subtext is an argument against literary waste. "Everything he writes" is telling; he's not only talking about sentences but about output, the whole transaction of writing-for-a-living. Charteris, best known for The Saint, worked in popular fiction where pace is currency and indulgence reads as drag. Economy becomes an ethical stance toward the reader's attention and an industrial stance toward deadlines, editors, and the need to keep stories moving. "Miserliness" hints at the pleasure of withholding - the deliberate refusal to over-explain, to decorate, to show off. It's the writer's version of leaving money on the table because you know what you'll need later.

There's also a defensive edge. By owning the charge of laziness, Charteris inoculates himself against critics who might confuse clean prose with thin ambition. He gets to define his restraint as intention, not limitation. The wit does the heavy lifting: it makes discipline feel like personality, and personality feel like authority.