Desks Quotes - Page 17

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Writing, Funny Things, Discipline

  "Barbara Kingsolver: How I Write". Interview with Noah Charney, www.thedailybeast.com. December 5, 2012.

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• My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Morning, Trying, Needs

  "Barbara Kingsolver: How I Write". Interview with Noah Charney, www.thedailybeast.com. December 5, 2012.

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• I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.

  Salman Rushdie

  Morning, Jobs, Discipline

  "The Bookers' favourite". Interview with Andrew Anthony, www.theguardian.com. April 5, 2008.

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• I can walk through a hotel lobby and watch people at the desk and see what they're doing. People don't look at me. They don't even know I'm there.

  Jerry Seinfeld

  Hotel Lobby, People, Watches

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• Starbucks was founded around the experience and the environment of their stores. Starbucks was about a space with comfortable chairs, lots of power outlets, tables and desks at which we could work and the option to spend as much time in their stores as we wanted without any pressure to buy. The coffee was incidental.

  Simon Sinek

  Coffee, Space, Tables

  "Blinded By Their Own Product: Starbucks Is Losing Its Buzz" by Simon Sinek, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 14, 2010.

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• As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.

  Raymond Chandler

  Book, Library, Littles

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The High Window: A Novel”, p.302, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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• Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)

  Isaac Babel

  Fighting, Years, Office

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• Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books . . . books . . . books. . . .

  Betty Smith

  Wall, Flower, Book

  Betty Smith (2009). “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”, p.19, Harper Collins

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• I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.

  Charles Bukowski

  Jobs, Work, Drinking

  "Factotum". Book by Charles Bukowski, Ch. 31, 1975.

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• Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” “Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again. “No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?” “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter

  Lewis Carroll

  Writing, Ravens, Ideas

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• The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.

  Alberto Manguel

  Wall, Book, Reflection

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.175, Vintage Canada

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• Don't equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don't let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you'd like them to spend the amount of time normally spent preparing for attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea.

  Harvey Mackay

  Friday, Monday, Morning

  Harvey Mackay (1996). “Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, & Outnegotiate Your Competition”, Ballantine Books

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• Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks.

  Bob Dylan

  Wall, War, Gun

  Bob Dylan (2013). “Lyrics:1962-2012”, p.72, Simon and Schuster

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• I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Writing, Reality, Drug

  Hunter S. Thompson, Beef Torrey, Kevin Simonson (2008). “Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson”, p.97, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.

  Hilary Mantel

  Attitude, Thinking, Trying

  Hilary Mantel (2013). “Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien”, p.147, HarperCollins UK

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• I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.

  Raymond Chandler

  Doors, Enough, Ought

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• It smells terrible in here.' Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.

  John Kennedy Toole

  Meaningful, Lying, Writing

  John Kennedy Toole (2004). “A Confederacy of Dunces”, p.70, LSU Press

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• Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand...well, God put a lot of thought into making you.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Simple, Men, Hands

  Khaled Hosseini (2011). “The Kite Runner: Rejacketed”, p.161, A&C Black

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• One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk. That's my goal.

  Patti Smith

  People, Goal, Want

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• 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.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Boys, Garbage Cans, Knocked Down

  "Bruce Springsteen: 'Talking'". Book edited by John W. Duffy, 2004.

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• In the '50s and '60s, journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for - it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job.

  Matt Taibbi

  Jobs, Boys, College

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• 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.

  Paul Theroux

  Book, Writing, Marketing

  "Fiction in the Age of E-Books". "The Atlantic" Interview, www.theatlantic.com. 2010.

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• 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.

  Orson Welles

  Fighting, Sitting, Use

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• 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.

  Tom Wolfe

  Father, Thinking, Editors

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• Personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didn't want these little toys on their desk.

  Howard Rheingold

  Teenager, People, Want

  The Frontline Interview, www.pbs.org. June 15, 1995.

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