Not John Lennon — actually Marthe Troly-CurtinMarthe Troly-CurtinBorn 1884 · novelist, author of the Phrynette books
?Attribution status: No documented Lennon source exists; the wording is traced to a 1912 novel.✓Reuse status: Free to reuse
The line is dialogue in Marthe Troly-Curtin’s 1912 novel Phrynette Married: “He liked it—time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” It sits on page 256 of the Toronto edition — 28 years before John Lennon was born — and Quote Investigator ↗ credits her, provisionally, as the earliest known source.
“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time” Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married (Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1912), p. 256. Commonly credited to John Lennon, but no documented Lennon source exists. Verified via Quotle.info.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to John Lennon. Use the credit shown above instead.
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✓ Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.
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In context
Evoking the world of Marthe Troly-Curtin — novelist · author of the Phrynette novels (1911–1912). Theme: "Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
Where the line actually appears
Work
Phrynette Married
Author
Marthe Troly-Curtin
Published
1912 — Macmillan Co. of Canada, Toronto
Location
Page 256, in dialogue
“Your father, for instance, don’t you think he would have done three times as much work if it had not been for your—what shall I say—‘bringing up’?” — “He liked it—time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” — “Oh, but it was in his case—wasted for him and for many lovers of art.”
Page 256
Transcribed from the Internet Archive’s microform scan of the 1912 Toronto edition, where the automatic text layer garbles the opening words as “e liked it—time you enjoy wasting ts not wasted time.” Spelling here follows the printed page.
1912 — The line appears as dialogue on page 256 of Phrynette Married, published in Toronto by Macmillan Co. of Canada; the full text is scanned at the Internet Archive ↗.
1912–1924 — It spreads as an unattributed saying, turning up in an Ashburton, New Zealand paper in December 1912, in US papers by 1920 (“isn’t always wasted time”), and in Kingston, Jamaica by 1924, per Quote Investigator ↗.
1977 — Peter’s Quotations prints the adage in parentheses after a genuine Bertrand Russell remark on leisure, seeding the Russell credit — Quote Investigator ↗.
2000 — The earliest credit to John Lennon that researchers have located, dated 14 October 2000 in an Australian horoscope column, in the form “Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted” — Quote Investigator ↗.
✓Public domain
Phrynette Married was published in 1912, well before the 1 January 1931 cutoff for US public domain — Wikisource ↗ hosts the author on exactly that basis. The novel was written in English, so no translation rights are involved.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Two famous names, neither of them the author
The saying circulated anonymously for most of a century before it picked up a celebrity byline — twice.
✕
The whole lineJohn Lennon No source ever produced
The earliest instance crediting Lennon that Quote Investigator ↗ found is dated 14 October 2000 — a horoscope column in Australia, and in the garbled form “Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.” That is nearly twenty years after his death in 1980, and no song, interview, letter or book of his has ever been offered as the source. Wikiquote’s Lennon page ↗ does not list it at all.
✕
The whole lineBertrand Russell Parenthesis mistaken for a quote
Peter’s Quotations (1977) printed a real Russell line about wanting “leisure with security,” then followed it with the adage in parentheses as the compiler’s own aside. Readers merged the two, and Russell has been credited ever since — as Quote Investigator ↗ documents.
~
The whole lineLaurence J. Peter Repeater, not originator
Peter did use the expression, but Quote Investigator ↗ notes he did so many years after the phrase was already in circulation, so he is a transmitter rather than the author.
✓The oldest known appearance is dialogue on page 256 of Marthe Troly-Curtin’s Phrynette Married (1912) — readable in full at the Internet Archive ↗.
Context
How a novelist’s aside became a Beatle’s wisdom
In Phrynette Married the sentence is not wisdom at all — it is a woman defending herself. Accused of having eaten up her father’s working hours, she shrugs it off: he liked it, and time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. Her accuser flatly disagrees in the next breath, which is exactly the sort of nuance that falls away when a line becomes a poster.
The phrase escaped the novel almost immediately. Quote Investigator ↗ tracks it into a New Zealand newspaper by December 1912, into United States papers by 1920 in the softened form “isn’t always wasted time,” and into a Kingston, Jamaica paper by 1924 — circulating for decades as an anonymous saying before any famous name was attached to it.
An anonymous saying for eighty years, then suddenly a Beatle’s.
Read the full story
The Bertrand Russell version is a typesetting accident. Quote Investigator ↗ shows that Laurence J. Peter’s Peter’s Quotations (1977) printed a genuine Russell remark about leisure and then added the adage in parentheses as his own comment; readers took the parenthesis for more Russell.
The Lennon credit is younger still. The earliest instance Quote Investigator located naming him is dated 14 October 2000, in the Mystic Medusa horoscope column in Australia, in the loose form “Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted” — nearly twenty years after his death in 1980.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Born 1884 · novelist · author of the Phrynette novels (1911–1912)
Marthe Troly-Curtin was the author of the light, chatty Phrynette novels — Phrynette and Phrynette and London (both 1911) and Phrynette Married (1912) — published on both sides of the Atlantic by J. B. Lippincott and, in Canada, by Macmillan. Almost nothing about her life survives in the reference record: Wikidata carries a birth year of 1884 and little else, and no death date has been established. Her one enduring line is a throwaway piece of dialogue that outlived every book she wrote.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married (Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1912), 256.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time’?” Last verified 6 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/time-you-enjoy-wasting-is-not-wasted-time/