“I am a person always full of contradictions… It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.”

The New York Times interview (1994)
Context: I've always considered myself an offbeat writer. Out here in California they like to categorize, so I'm a science fiction writer. I wrote science fiction to break into the writing business. My love is fantasy. I wrote one of my early novels in four days sitting in a closet which I'd converted into an office, using an old Smith-Corona that my parents had given me for Christmas when I was 12.

Source: Kronos US v Sulaiman Abu Ghayth Statement https://kronosadvisory.com/Kronos_US_v_Sulaiman_Abu_Ghayth_Statement.1.pdf (July 2001)

Interview by Andrea Di Marcantonio

Speech at Victoria Hall, Geneva (10 December 1931) http://www.gandhiserve.org/information/listen_to_gandhi/lec_11_france_genevawtrans/augven_geneva_01.html
1930s

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

Sometimes quoted with "difficult" instead of "hard".
A similar thought was expressed by automobile executive Clarence Bleicher in 1947 (before Bill Gates was born): "if you get a tough job, one that is hard, and you haven’t got a way to make it easy, put a lazy man on it, and after 10 days he will have an easy way to do it".
Misattributed
Source: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/26/lazy-job/