Top 265 Desk Quotes

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.

I didn’t want a desk job; I knew I’d get bored.

I’ve got a big closet of scripts, and a big stack of scripts on the side of my desk, because you get a whole bunch. Nothing’s going to be perfect, and I realize that; but I am a perfectionist, so you go through a lot of stuff.

In one sense, I wanted to study philosophy and theology, getting into the history of the Bible. I went through that for, like, two years while I took a desk job at Warners. It was very depressing but exhilarating at the same time.

I’m terrible in the mornings, but I’m always at my desk by 10 A.M.

My desk, most loyal friend thank you. You’ve been with me on every road I’ve taken. My scar and my protection.

I don’t think I could ever have a desk job, so I get to be mobile. I’m on set. I get to walk around kind of doing my own thing, being independent – it’s just a really good vibe. Everyone on a film set is very happy, and they all love their jobs, so it’s a cool environment to be a part of.

There’s no question in my mind of the value in technology in fueling young minds. Like any other tool, if you simply throw it in the classroom and don’t consider how best to take advantage of that tool, and you try the old ways with a new piece of technology on the desk, it’s no panacea.

I wander around online, but until I hit my daily word count, I only leave my desk to make some tea, eat, or to answer the door. At 7 P.M., I give up and spend the rest of the evening catching up with the news.

I kind of slept through school. I wasn’t engaged at all. My exercise books were empty at the end of the year. But I didn’t sleep through drama, probably because there wasn’t a desk, so my teacher sent me to this audition.

I find writing extremely difficult. I usually have to drag myself to my desk, mainly because I doubt myself. And it’s getting harder because I want to improve with every book.

Every day I go to my study and sit at my desk and put the computer on. At that moment, I have to open the door. It’s a big, heavy door. You have to go into the Other Room. Metaphorically, of course. And you have to come back to this side of the room. And you have to shut the door.

I’ve always voted Republican because America is exactly that, a republic. You can’t expect much leadership with a Democrat behind the desk their not even close to dual efficient.

I really just like to be at a desk.

I, for one, find writing excruciating. Some mornings, as I’m on my way to my desk, my hands actually tremble with fear. The fear, of course, is that I’ll sit down at the desk and discover that what I’ve written is claptrap. Fear inevitably leads to procrastination.

Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial – but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.

Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person.

I didn’t have a desk to write ‘Red Queen’ on, so I got a nice writing desk.

The telephone call that forever changed the lives of the Dodd family of Chicago came at noon on Thursday, June 8, 1933, as William E. Dodd sat at his desk at the University of Chicago.

I’m writing a book, and there’s not even space for a desk in our home. So I spent my hard-earned book money and rented the small apartment downstairs from us.

I put the copy of ‘A Christmas Carol’ that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the ‘Christmas Spirits.’ I plan to read it to my grandson.

I keep my stand-up comedy notes in a pile on my desk. I don’t organize my act. I keep myself in a state of confusion. It stresses me out, but I prefer creative chaos.

I phoned the KKK Grand Wizard David Duke in Louisiana and asked why my membership was being delayed. He said my application was on his desk and promised to deal with it personally. It was the first of many conversations with David Duke. We talked about his family, the weather, and about his political ambitions.

It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.

If I still had my legs, I would be in line for a battalion command, and instead, I’m flying a desk.

I’m always doing comedy and will never hit up a 9-to-5 desk job.

Sir, I see a lot of documents in my day-to-day business, and I can’t tell you every document that I’ve seen. It may have passed across my desk. It may not have passed across my desk. I truthfully cannot answer that question, other than to say I don’t remember.

I never really have to sit at a desk thinking, ‘What should I do now?’ It doesn’t work like that for me, and it never has. My thinking process is constant.

The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.

You gotta know that you’re better than anybody, ’cause to me, if you don’t go in like that, you’re gonna lose! They’re gonna punk you out! On any stage, court, business venture, on the anchor desk – whatever. You’ve got to go in believing, ‘I can do this better than anybody.’

When I’m the happiest, my desk is not neat. It has lots of pens and the books I love. It gets messy when I’m in the flow. So many houses are so neat.

‘Don Quixote’ is a very political book that has been used by diplomats, politicians, guerrilla fighters, to inspire people, to convince them that they themselves can become quixotic. George Washington had a copy of the book on his desk when signing the U.S. Constitution.

Why does this person who is sitting behind a desk and never watches cartoons is arguing about what cartoons should be like. Its so creepy realizing that this person is a lunatic.

I used to be good at clothes shopping and whatnot – at least ,I think I was! – but at some point after two kids and a career that worked out better than I ever could have imagined, I looked up from my desk and realized that I wore the same three t-shirts and 15-year-old jeans every day.

I didn’t want to be behind a desk. I didn’t want to do a normal job. I had made my mind up. I became despondent prematurely. I had my mid-life crisis when I was 16. I suppose I’d agree with that. But acting has helped me develop a lot in my private life.

When the Smoot-Hawley bill landed on President Herbert Hoover’s desk, more than 1,000 economists urged him to veto it. Tragically, the president ignored their pleas.

There’s always been in my life that tension between living and writing. For me, because I’m so physically exuberant, it was extra hard to sit still at the desk and put in the hours that you need to put in to write.

I was the kind of kid, I’d sit in the back row of the class with my head practically under the desk. I was incredibly afraid of people and very shy.

Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, respect me, I’m a respectable grown-up, and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death.

I always have Moleskine notebooks on my desk. I am a big journaler. Every day I write down where I went, who I spoke to and what it was all about. Richard Branson told me to do that.

I’m always involved with training and the martial arts. It’s not like I go to a desk job somewhere and then throw on the gloves.

The way in which you carry yourself, even when seated at a desk, matters.

The transition of a desk job, having to be in the office at the same time every day, I found super hard.

I sit down at my desk pretty early in the morning and write all day until about 4 or 5 p.m.

I was down in Wilmington, Delaware, doing ‘The Desk Set’ with Shirley Booth. I was at the DuPont Hotel. I walked out, and there was this grill next door called the New England Grill. I loved seafood. They said very nicely, ‘We don’t serve colored people.’

On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

Do me a favor – right now, today, start a list of all your crazy obsessions, the things that get your heart pumping, that wake you up in the middle of the night. Put it above your desk and use it to guide you, to jumpstart your writing each and every day.

Most of the scripts that land on my desk are stuff you read and go, ‘Is someone really gonna make this?’

I write at home. I like to be able to take a nap, watch TV, make a sandwich, and if I wake up and don’t feel like working, I’m not going to bang my head on my desk all day: I’ll go out and do something else.

Eighteen holes of match play will teach you more about your foe than 18 years of dealing with him across a desk.

When I’m writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.

We need more of the Office Desk and less of the Show Window in politics. Let men in office substitute the midnight oil for the limelight.

I can guarantee you this, that more pension and benefit reforms which I will consider arbitration reform to be one of them, are things that when they come to my desk, they will be signed.

I was a kid, and I would watch standup comics do the ‘Tonight Show,’ and if Johnny Carson liked you, he’d wave you over to the desk; that pretty much meant you were about to be the most successful comedian in the country for the next few years.

While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local YMCA, then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at ‘The Mountain View Voice,’ my hometown newspaper.

The Oscar sits on some shelf above my desk. If there was an earthquake, I could actually be killed by my own Academy Award.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

I’ve got so many things coming across my desk right now that are nonfootball related, I can’t stand it.

In the third grade, a nun stuffed me in a garbage can under her desk because she said that’s where I belonged. I also had the distinction of being the only altar boy knocked down by a priest during mass.

In the studio, I don’t use an amp, I just go direct into the desk. It’s virtually acoustic, what I’m doing.

Dub has been a big influence in terms of production. It’s inspired so many people and so much music – in terms of music where mixing desk was the instrument. Central to that is the echo chamber, and I think there’s a little bit of a romantic thing there.

I got into acting because nothing else worked. I have done literally everything. I have sold magazines door-to-door. I’ve worked on an assembly line in a factory, a restaurant, the desk at a hotel. I’ve worked in statistical typing, taught school. You name it, I tried it, and nothing worked.

My ambition is to sit behind a desk and work.

It’s so, so awful for my entire body and my spine and my hands, and I have a perfectly good desk to write at, but I don’t care. I love writing in bed.

People have an idea that one is in control of a career, a lot more than you really are. You can engineer things to an extent. But you are at the mercy of what comes in across the desk.

I came into the advertising business in 1952, at the age of sixteen, as a delivery boy for a stuffy, old-line advertising agency named Ruthruff and Ryan, which could have served as the setting for the ‘Mad Men’ television series without moving a desk.

More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.

My desk drawer is filled with all kinds of prayers.

The way in which you carry yourself, even when seated at a desk, matters.

The best part about traveling for work is that it’s better than sitting behind a desk!

When somebody was looking in my locker, it was like going in my desk. Somebody happened to be looking in my locker when they shouldn’t have been.

Keep a copy of ‘Islands in the Stream’ by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald’s ‘The Crack Up’ on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes.

I don’t like sitting still at a desk and often conduct business on my Blackberry or in walking meetings.

Jay Prince is a real gangster. He ain’t hiding behind a desk talking. He is the true living definition of what a gangster is. If you wanna see the truth and what gangster really is, that’s what Jay Prince is.

In the past, I was free to write in quiet and in the space wherever my desk was at. I could leave my instruments out. In the past, my writing was super private; I never liked showing my work at its earliest stages.

You can know a person by the kind of desk he keeps. If the president of a company has a clean desk then it must be the executive vice president who is doing all the work.

Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this – that it’s a job?

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

It is wonderful to say that your days behind a school desk are over. It’s just another phase in your life.

At my first Olympics, I didn’t have a contract, and I wasn’t making any money. After my first Olympics, I was working at 24 Hour Fitness at the front desk. I would go to practice in the morning, run home, shower, grab some food and then go straight to work. I didn’t get off of work until 10 or 11 o’clock at night.

My father was a truck driver. That’s where it all started, and academically I was a disaster at school. My cousin got his name on the honour board; I, at Melbourne High School, I carved mine on the desk.

When you hear of somebody named Goldberg, you think of a guy sitting behind a desk investing your money.

I haven’t pursued it as a senator because I know it’s like spitting in the wind. But I still believe it’s the right thing. And if I were governor and a bill came to my desk that provided for background checks at gun shows, I would sign that.

I am so organized that it’s dysfunctional. Everything has a place. I am a very visual person, so my environment is important to me. If my environment is messy, I can’t think clearly. I don’t like clutter. A clean desk is a clean mind for me.

I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen.

I always wanted to run a major label, and I feel like I got the skills to do that. The one thing about me is that I won’t sit behind a desk the whole time – I’ll go to the clubs and see what’s hot.

Traditionally, the only way I come up with cartoons is by sitting at my desk and thinking.

In the early 1980s, Linley was a cooperative. There were four of us who designed and made cabinets and desk accessories.

Sometimes when I’m at my desk, I’ll realize that I have contorted myself completely, and I haven’t moved for hours, and that my legs have fallen asleep. I am elsewhere, not in my body, not in the room, not in my house.

Some people may have noticed the new computer shelf at the anchor desk. Rather than phone calls, we want to take real time e-mails, and we’ll be starting that very soon.

My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.

When I first starting writing, and no one was paying me, in order to feel like I had a real job, I would get out of bed, put on a jacket and tie every morning, and sit down at my desk.

It used to be presumed that if you weren’t at your desk working, you weren’t working, But we said, ‘Why can’t we make a workplace where casual meetings are as important as working at your desk?’ Sometimes that’s where your better creative work happens.

I was a public affairs officer. I worked with the media, but I didn’t just stay at my desk. I assisted in military duties, travelled around Anbar province, hung out with a wide variety of Marines.

Ivanka Trump’s declared mission to ’empower women who work’ is a welcome element in the Trump administration. As a woman with a desk in the White House and the founder of an international corporation, she is certainly in a position to improve the wages, safety, and quality of life of working women around the world.

We are able to use technology to make it clear that someone’s car is available or a room in a home is accessible; that there is an available desk in an office someplace.

After 9/11, I didn’t look to go sit on the Swiss desk – I stepped up. I was not on the sidelines.

I couldn’t stand still at a desk for another year. I wanted to go out there and make films.

I don’t need somebody behind a desk to tell me what a marketing survey says is funny. I got 3 million miles and 70,000 tickets sold, telling me that I know how to make people laugh.

I grew up on film sets and I had a ball. It wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun if my dad had been working behind a desk somewhere. I remember being on the set of ‘The Godfather: Part III,’ and all the kids were running around and doing crazy things, and Francis Ford Coppola just embraced that.

One sits the whole day at the desk and appetite is standing next to me. ‘Away with you’, I say. But Comrade Appetite does not budge from the spot.

Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

I’m very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.

Longevity, for a columnist, is a simple proposition: Once you start, you don’t stop. You do it until you die or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax.

I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.

I usually choose movies that I would want to see. I appreciate drama and if the right script came across my desk, drama you will see.

When things aren’t working out, we have a tendency to say, ‘Go do other things,’ but you shouldn’t do other things. You need to stay at your desk and continue to try to write. You need to insist on it.

Professionally, I remember Cronkite as a kid growing up, and more so for me, the importance of Cronkite was not him sitting there at the anchor desk, but him out there doing things.

Berlin was the first, the very first to give me an award. I am eternally grateful to them. It sits on my desk – the Silver Bear. All the others are stored away. It’s the only one I look at. It watches me while I work.

Dub has been a big influence in terms of production. It’s inspired so many people and so much music – in terms of music where mixing desk was the instrument. Central to that is the echo chamber, and I think there’s a little bit of a romantic thing there.

You can’t reinvent the wheel. I remember when we first started out at ‘Late Night,’ we were trying to hire directors, and this guy was like, ‘I see you behind a glass desk.’ I don’t. And he’s like, ‘Yeah, the glass desk.’ I go, ‘I don’t really see me as a glass desk guy.’

All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.

Sometimes, when I’m sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing’s coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, ‘This is really good.’

One of the biggest mistakes I see in the bedroom is that they plan to be doing things other than sleeping in the bedroom. They will have a desk in there for working, or they’ll have a big shelf in there for storing things. It should be all about relaxing.

My desk is right next to my bed. So I sit on my bed. I write in a big notebook which is on the desk. And if I feel drowsy, I just have to slide into bed.

Nine times out of ten, people consider a nice little Jewish boy the kid who grows up and sits behind a desk preparing your taxes. I’ve certainly broken that stereotype in many ways.

I would rise, monk-like, at 6 A.M., speak to no one, make tea, and go immediately to my desk from which I didn’t move until frills appeared around the edges of my eyes or I heard the sound of a wine bottle being uncorked. It would give the wrong impression to describe these as Writing Days.

My business partner and make-up artist Kim Jacob and I have employed every member of staff, decided where every desk in the office should go, tried every product on our faces.

I remember when I was like 19 years old and I started a desk calendar company to pay for my first short film, just so I could say one day that my daddy didn’t pay for my first short film. And I really established myself in the film festival world.

It’s pointless to have a nice clean desk, because it means you’re not doing anything.

Being in a long-running series is great because it gives you so many opportunities – but at the same time it’s a bit desk jobby: you go to the same place every day, you do the same thing and you play the same character.

I always laugh at these companies that have these rules saying, ‘You’re only allowed to have this or that on your desk.’ It’s no fun to work at a place like that.

My first publication was a haiku in a children’s magazine when I was 9 years old. I received one dollar for it! I gave the check to my dad for Christmas, and he framed it and hung it over his desk.

No trooper, no special forces operative wants to sit behind a desk. We joined up to kick some doors down.

My desk faces the water, and I’m perfectly happy sitting there. I’m never lonely.

I am a terrible mixture of being organized, controlling, but chaotic. My desk is monstrous.

As a writer, I’m mostly at my desk, staring out my window. No one sees me.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

I finished ‘Heartsick’ with my daughter asleep in her bassinet by my desk, a feat that any new mother will tell you cannot be sufficiently praised.

No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

Well, for over a year now at my desk, a prototype program of Luigi and Mario has been running on my monitor. We’ve been thinking about the game, and it may be something that could work on a completely new game system.

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

I like to sit at my desk… sometimes I get inspiration when I’m going about my normal day-to-day life.

Cancer taught me to live only in the day I’m in. In the moment I’m in. Some moments, I simply ground myself by touching the desk, the table, the wall wherever I am and say, ‘You’re right here. Stay put in this moment.’

David Letterman is the best late-night talk show host right now, hands down, and has been since he first took the desk.

As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I’ve never heard one say, ‘No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.’ They will always say, ‘You don’t like him? I’ve got somebody else.’ They’re totally spineless.

I’ve never sent an email in my life. My kids laugh. I often hand the phone to them and say, ‘Can you text this message to somebody.’ I don’t even have a computer on my desk.

I didn’t really want deadlines and editorial work. I wanted something mechanical and eight hours a day. So I went to work, thinking it was easy – ha, ha – on the complaint desk at the circulation department.

I had a fifth grade teacher who, as a very small way of trying to contain my class clown energy, gave me 10 minutes at the end of class every Friday to present whatever I wanted. A lot of the time, I did an Andy Rooney impression. I would sit at her desk, empty it, and just comment on what was in there.

Ireland starts for me with the end of ‘The Dead,’ which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I’ve turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house.

I know how to do the other stuff – the ‘Access’ stuff and go be goofy and all that. That I can do. For me to sit on a desk, when I know on the other network is Bob Costas and Dan Patrick is a change.

I’m a freelance writer, and I work alone at a big desk in the living room of my apartment. There are many days when I don’t utter a single word to anyone but my husband.

I did a lot of freelance desk publishing jobs when I graduated from college. I sort of earned a living doing that while I was writing plays, which was what I wanted to do. My hope was to become a playwright.

Helping set the day’s agenda and deciding what we used and editing it, that was a journalistic high point. I liked reporting as well. Just doing the news – the live performance – wasn’t important. Working on the desk was.

I am so organized that it’s dysfunctional. Everything has a place. I am a very visual person, so my environment is important to me. If my environment is messy, I can’t think clearly. I don’t like clutter. A clean desk is a clean mind for me.

When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.

On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

Before signing any contract, you have to assume that the guy on the other side of the desk is handing you a shifty piece of paper that works to his advantage. I know that sounds cynical, but it’s really that simple.

I work in a room overlooking the river. I try to get to my desk as soon as I’ve fed my cats and chickens. I use a blue 3B pencil and scribble away for about 20 pages before transferring it to the computer.

My photos would not be as high quality without my dad. He’s a contractor, and together we converted an area in our basement into a makeup studio with a desk, a mirror lined with dimmable lights, and storage areas.

I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn’t bring my chairs with me.

For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you’re sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.

Good actors can tell you more about your play than 1,000 hours alone at your desk.

I didn’t go to school for illustration. I did larger pieces, mostly drawings and paintings, and minored in video, but when I moved to N.Y.C., I didn’t have a studio space anymore and downsized to my desk and started illustrating. I started a greeting card company and sold cards all over the city.

When a story is flying along, and I’m so into it that my ‘real’ world goes away, it can feel magical. I cease to be, my desk and computer ceases to be, and I am my character in his world. Psychologists call this a ‘flow state,’ and it’s better than publication, money, awards, fame.

Suppose you were working at your job one day, and you made a little mistake. Then all of a sudden a red light went on over your desk, and fifteen thousand people stood up and yelled at you that you sucked?

Writing is a sedentary gig unless one has a treadmill desk. But I have long believed writing and working out are complementary disciplines.

I just couldn’t take school seriously: I had this guitar neck with four frets which I kept hidden under the desk. It had strings on it so I would practice my chord shapes under the desk and that’s about all I did at school.

For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you’re sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.

I will never forget the bright September day, standing at my desk in the White House, when my young assistant said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center – and then a second one – and a third, the Pentagon.

I can guarantee you this, that more pension and benefit reforms which I will consider arbitration reform to be one of them, are things that when they come to my desk, they will be signed.

Nobody just flops a complete ‘Doc Martin’ script on the desk. They all have to be taken apart and all the apologizing taken out. Because it’s hard to have a protagonist that doesn’t really like anyone and nobody really likes him; it’s a hard premise to start from.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.

Suppose Watergate had not been uncovered? I’d still be on the City Desk.

Most people go to the office and sit at a desk. When firefighters go to the office, we might birth a baby in the morning, save a drowning surfer in the afternoon, and run into a fire at night. What could be more interesting than that?

So I started to relax and would work on my act eight hours a day, sitting at a desk writing at my grandmother’s house, and I would put on Richard Pryor Live on Long Beach and would play it like a loop and think and write.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

I see friends of mine who have kids and continue to do their art. It’s deeply impressive. I can’t even fit an Amazon return into the day. It’s been sitting on my desk for two weeks.

Professionally, I remember Cronkite as a kid growing up, and more so for me, the importance of Cronkite was not him sitting there at the anchor desk, but him out there doing things.

Michael is a funny character, for whom I have a great deal of affection. He sat across his desk and seemed to be a bit of a blunt fellow. We began talking about the characters and he opened up about his vision.

At ‘The Daily Show,’ we were satirizing a news program. You put somebody in a suit, you put ’em behind a desk, and they become an authority figure.

As writers, our craft makes us sit alone at a desk and hammer away at our novel. Doing that day in and day out makes it really easy to forget that there’s a whole community of writers out there, and they love contributing to other writers’ success!

I wake up with the story in my head, so I really like to be at my desk about five minutes after I wake up. So I don’t get dressed. I put on a bathrobe, I make tea and sit at my desk.

I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run.

I’d just woken up from a nap, it was around 6:30 in the evening. I was eating some shrimp crackers at my desk. Then I get a call from an unknown number in Burbank, California and my heart immediately skips a beat because I know the Disney home office is in Burbank.

I can’t say that while I sat at my desk cold calling or trying to help people re-mortgage that playing for England was a real achievable goal.

I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.

I went to art school… but I worked at the Museum of Modern Art. I worked in fundraising at the information membership desk. I ended up, over a period of time, doubling the amount of membership revenue that came in through people entering the museum, so people would ask me to come and work for them.

The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.

I wrote a play once called ‘Lobby Hero,’ which I thought turned out very well, but there’s no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.

This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.

I’m at my desk before nine, and I go all day. I’m not necessarily productive all day, but really, who is?

Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

My office is tiny. I think most people would be shocked if they came to my home and saw it. It is, in fact, the former makeup room of a gorgeous local TV newscaster. I keep a neat desk. Clutter makes me anxious.

We’re not militant, but there are certain things that are absolutely secret. There was a pilot printed on red paper, and I read everything on my iPad and have a scanner on my desk for these purposes. I scanned in the script, and red paper script scans in perfectly fine.

This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.

I think I’ve got it pretty easy compared with somebody who works at a desk nine to five. I’m just working for an hour in the evening. I get a bit breathless, as I have to talk non-stop because of the puppets.

If your desk isn’t cluttered, you probably aren’t doing your job.

I was chastised for writing several obituaries for Malcolm X, exploring different aspects of his writing. One teacher in particular told me, didn’t I think I was beating a dead horse? and dismissively threw my paper on my desk.

I enjoy playing other people. It’s a great job and it’s challenging. I couldn’t do a desk job.

Successful writers say you should never work from a desk with a view, and the view I have from this one is a huge distraction. There’s a garden bursting with fresh vegetation, and just beyond the high wall at the end of it, I can see the sign of the local pub across the road. Distractions, eh? I’m so easily led.

In every single one of my purses, even my little satin clutch and my tiny Chanel bag, I always carry a lint roller. I keep them in every drawer, in every desk and nightstand. I just buy those at the dollar store in bulk.

At home I have a mixing desk that I like playing around on. It’s great fun making music myself. And music has always been a very good counterbalance to football for me. It allows me to switch off and relax.

I find it easier to write in the winter in Melbourne. When the weather is good you want to go out for a walk, ride a bike, go to a cafe or something. When it’s raining, when it’s a miserable day, I just sit down at my desk and get some work done.

I find it very difficult to say no when I’m in Ireland. You do end up going around doing lots of events and things and not getting work done, and it’s not just a question of having hours at the desk.

A very important part of my workday are the two Nunzillas on my windowsill. They keep me constant company. They’re little windup toys, and when they move across the desk, they spark from the mouth. I think of them as my editors. They sort of remind you that the world can be a silly place.

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

I have a desk that I can raise or lower according to the state of my aching back. Sometimes I stand at it, and sometimes I have it high up to write at and sometimes a bit lower to type.

I just had this moment where I was sitting at my desk, and I realized what it was that I’d been wanting to do since I was a little girl – and that was act.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

Prior to Saving Private Ryan I never worked with men. I was always working with some babe, and it was always about falling in love, and it just got turned around. I’m not looking for any particular kind of story. I wait until it comes across my desk.

I’ve always had a picture of the White House and it would always sit right in front of my desk. Whenever I was having a hard day I could look at it and remember what my goal was.

It’s pointless to have a nice clean desk, because it means you’re not doing anything.

Walking is a great way to exercise, and we can find ways to take additional steps each day by parking a car farther away from a destination, climbing stairs instead of taking the elevator or escalator, and walking during occasional breaks from sitting at a desk.

Longevity, for a columnist, is a simple proposition: Once you start, you don’t stop. You do it until you die or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax.

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer’s life, as to a professor’s life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don’t do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.

My first job was being a page at ‘The Tonight Show.’ I saw Jack Paar come out one night and sit on the edge of his desk and talk about what he’d done the night before. I thought, ‘I can do that!’ I used to do that on a street corner in the Bronx with all my buddies.

When I’m sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it’s silence and despair! It’s not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

I was nominated at first by a group called Justice Democrats. They were trying to essentially field non-corporate candidates in the 2018 midterm election. They were looking for people with a history of community service, and my name had come across their desk, and they called.

I’ve seen how the issues that come across a president’s desk are always the hard ones – the problems where no amount of data or numbers will get you to the right answer.

I’m always a great student of writers’ work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk’s robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.

All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.

My suspicion is that a lot of these office buildings will start to evolve from being optimized for individual offices or cube space to being hot offices where you decide which day you’re going to come in and then you reserve a desk.

Indeed, in a world of the BlackBerry, remote access and Wi-Fi hotspots on every street corner, it feels particularly outdated that much of our working culture is still dominated by the need to be at our desk for long hours of the day.

When you sit at your desk, if you’re lucky, there’s a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.

I’ve found myself at one in the morning just sitting at my desk spending an hour returning emails from the day until like two in the morning. It’s ridiculous, I should be sleeping, or dreaming, or reading a novel.

When I was younger, I avoided exercise or anything strenuous. I didn’t even enjoy walking. As I got older, I spent so much time marking books or sitting at a desk writing that there was no room for exercise – not that I would have bothered anyway.

You may think having a cluttered desk isn’t that big of a deal. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Disorganization can stunt your professional growth and decrease your productivity.

I cheated once on a spelling test. I didn’t know how to spell period. I leaned over the desk and looked at someone else’s paper. I was probably ten or something like that.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don’t use a computer when I write, and I don’t use a piano. I’m at a desk writing, and it’s very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

It’s easier to sit at your desk and have a bun, but I’ve been really disciplined because I feel like I have to give myself a chance. You can’t let yourself down on that. You have to be mentally sharp in this Premier League.

Learning something new is a fabulous way to be refreshed. When work can grind you down, something about learning a new activity thrills the soul. It reminds you that the world is bigger than your desk and your to-do list.

You’re sitting in the car for many, many minutes a day. Can that be part of your new office? Can it be your new desk, a place where you actually get work done? We believe it can.

I was the most reckless little kid. I only had guy friends. I had a Nintendo, and when I went to normal school, I used to tape it under my desk and then pull it out and play on it.

I have a study at the back of the house, overlooking our garden. It’s tiny, just wide enough to fit my desk in. The walls are covered with pin boards and art postcards from galleries all over the world, including Tate, MoMA, and Lenbachhaus.

There’s already a marriage clock, a career clock, a biological clock. Sometimes being a woman feels like standing in the lobby of a hotel, looking at the dials depicting every time zone in the world behind the front desk – except they all apply to you, and all at once.

On the first day of school, you got to be real careful where you sit. You walk into the classroom and just plunk your stuff down on any old desk, and the next thing you know the teacher is saying, ‘I hope you all like where you’re sitting, because these are your permanent seats.’

There’s nothing romantic about my work… I don’t believe in inspiration. I believe that you get to your desk, you stay there, you work, you think of nothing else. You write and you write, and in the end, you write something good.

We predicted the concept of a telephone that isn’t tied to a wall or a desk. We anticipated that everyone would have a cell phone. We joked that when you’re born you would be assigned a cell phone and if you didn’t answer you had died.

I want to die at my desk.

The issues that cross a president’s desk are never easy. The easy questions don’t even get to the president.

Getting the approval of Ric Flair is the wrestling world’s version of Johnny Carson calling you over to the desk after you just crushed a standup set on ‘The Tonight Show.’

I’ve always loved flowers, as a little girl I’d collect flower objects and little flower books. Now I love flowers on my night table and on my desk.

I eat and drink at my desk, but I’m a tidy eater.

I rise near dawn, make a strong cup of coffee, wander to my desk and come fully awake by reading something written the day before.

If I get incensed about some injustice, you can’t make me – I will not just going to sit at my desk, at my computer all the time. I – I might want to march out on that.

I’m at my desk for about 9:30 A.M., and I stay there all day. Then there’s a lot of checking Facebook and eBay and that sort of thing.

A good leader doesn’t get stuck behind a desk.

I had this desk alongside the most beautiful Australian 18-year-old girl with long brown hair, and I got up enough nerve to ask her for a date.

Eighteen holes of match play will teach you more about your foe than 18 years of dealing with him across a desk.

Whether it was a shoe store or working the front desk of a hotel, I was always interacting with people. I’d get that look because I’m half-white and half-Filipino. They could tell I was something, but they really couldn’t tell what I was.

In high school, I interned at my mother’s restaurant and learned the small-business ropes. It was really instructive and taught me to switch contexts quickly, as I contributed to everything from managing the reception desk to building their website.

I have a lot of great racing memories growing up in Europe as a young boy – playing with car parts on my dad’s desk, watching the races on Sunday afternoons to try and spot him on TV, even having the chance to go to Formula 1 races where he was working.

I was never too much into school. I liked lunchtimes and breaks, but nah, I hated sitting at a desk. I was always looking out of the window, looking at my watch, thinking about when I could play football.

I really just like to be at a desk.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

I never really have to sit at a desk thinking, ‘What should I do now?’ It doesn’t work like that for me, and it never has. My thinking process is constant.

I’ve got friends who are so good at getting away with things, like going up to the desk to get upgraded on a plane, for example. I haven’t got any of that kind of confidence in those situations. I look so awkward. I act awkward. I’m really apologetic.

If you look at my desk… it’s profoundly disorganised – which is why I can work on search.

If you want to do a talk show on network television, you’re probably going to wind up having a desk and a band, wearing a suit, and having a sidekick. Audiences want to feel comfortable.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called ‘The Southern Planter.’ He didn’t think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I’d seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer.

I have a very strict regimen of showing up at my desk at a certain hour with my cup of green tea. It is very quiet. I don’t like having a lot of atmosphere around.

When Ando arrives in the studio, he picks up his pen even before he gets a cup of tea, and he stays seated until the very last train at night. He hardly eats, just nibbles at little balls of rice at his desk.

Insights don’t usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I’m on the move. Or half-asleep.

At the start of my two years at Juventus, I had big plans for the club, but it turned out that the Intertoto Cup was the only medal in my desk drawer when finally they told me to pack my bags. We started the first season really well, and Conte was so important for me.

But I really like hosting, I think it’s a strength of mine. It allows me to improvise, and I love the spontaneity of that, and I think I’m funny behind the desk when interviewing someone.

After ‘Radio Flyer,’ to this day, every family-oriented script or script with kid actors comes across my desk. That’s just Hollywood: you get pigeonholed, and it’s both a blessing and a curse, but you live with it.

I’ve always loved flowers, as a little girl I’d collect flower objects and little flower books. Now I love flowers on my night table and on my desk.

I love all Goop products, but I’ll always have the Revitalizing Day Moisturizer on my desk at work or in my handbag.

Happiness is a very small desk and a very big wastebasket.

I would have written ‘Brown Girl Dreaming’ if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we’ve come through.

Whether it was a shoe store or working the front desk of a hotel, I was always interacting with people. I’d get that look because I’m half-white and half-Filipino. They could tell I was something, but they really couldn’t tell what I was.