He laboured over the distinction between two kinds of action: sign action, or semiosis, and dynamic, or mechanical, action.
He laboured over his letters, crafting elegant and witty sentences, saying important, interesting things, often to important, interesting people.
He laboured energetically to fill it: in the last 13 years of his life he fathered six more children with a concubine, adding to the nine he already had.
He laboured on it for five years, fleeing his home in Israel's Negev desert to a remote mountain village in Cyprus for the seclusion he needed to complete it.
He laboured throughout his career to inject that sex rush, that religious feeling, that existential frisson, into his holy pictures of leather sex, black men, celebrity women and flowers brilliant as night-blooming sex organs.
He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756; An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words.
He laboured through 7-6 (7-5) 7-6 (7-5) 4-6 7-6 (7-4) in three hours 53 minutes on a baking Louis Armstrong Stadium.
As Americans turned away from beef, he laboured to get fried chicken right.
Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life.
