Desks Quotes - Page 22

• Buffon said unreservedly, "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme." To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk."

  Santiago Ramon y Cajal

  Writing, Science, Years

  Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Neely Swanson, Larry W. Swanson (2004). “Advice for a Young Investigator”, p.64, MIT Press

  32 Copy quote

  Show source

• People live and work in uninspiring environments, but look inside those rooms. Look at the painted walls and the decorations. People rebel even in the most controlled office environment in which they're not allowed to do anything. You see the little bulletin board in front of a person's desk with their photos, clippings, cartoons and whatever else.

  Frank Gehry

  Wall, Office, People

  Interview with David Sheff, www.playboy.com. March 1, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Bush explained his strategy for transfer of power. It's a two part plan. Part one: clean out his desk. Part two: rent a U-Haul.

  David Letterman

  Two, Strategy, Clean

  4 Copy quote

• There are problems that just end up being really hard and by definition the only problems that come to my desk are the ones that nobody else can solve.

  Barack Obama

  Being Real, Definitions, Problem

  Source: www.vanityfair.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I was a little kid back in Moscow, Russia, I've always thought I would become an artist or a folk dancer or an astronomer. In fact, if you'd asked me then about a life of solitary writing I would have said, "Oh how boring! Imagine, to sit at a desk all day and just write."

  Vera Nazarian

  Writing, Kids, Artist

  Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• For a ridiculous analogy, let's take Purple Rain. If you were to put Purple Rain and The Sound of Music on the desk of a producer, he or she would know that the majority of moviegoers would rather listen to Prince. Since they are in the business of making money, no one can blame them. But if it ever came to the decision of making a film like that I'd say, "No." They are very easy films to make, though. In Purple Rain there is nothing complex about the way that they dance. Or sing. It would be a bit boring for an adult to make that film. It just wouldn't test their métier.

  Gene Kelly

  Rain, Purple, Decision

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• One thing about being a performer is you're not just doing an intellectual job behind a desk; you're out there performing and being looked at, being assessed for really superficial stuff.

  Amanda Palmer

  Jobs, Intellectual, Stuff

  Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Let's say I'm on the policy wonk end of the spectrum. As much as I can dive into a briefing book and really work to master various subjects that come before my desk, I'm still not an expert on a huge amount of the stuff that we work on.

  Barack Obama

  Book, Experts, Stuff

  Source: abcnews.go.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm a neat freak... It seems to me that an orderly desk is reflective of an orderly and organized mind, you know?

  Jann Wenner

  Organized Mind, Freak, Neat

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Lindsay Fox

  Cousin, Father, School

  12 Copy quote

• J.P. Morgan, then past 70, was asked by the son of an eminent father why he [Morgan] didn't retire. When did your father retire? asked Mr. Morgan, without looking up from his desk. In 1902. When did he die? Oh, at the end of 1904. Huh! snapped Mr. Morgan, If he had kept on working he would have been alive still. Work is God's best medicine. It is God's medicine for man.

  B. C. Forbes

  Father, Work, Son

  4 Copy quote

• Mr. Pickwick took a seat and the paper, but instead of reading the latter, peeped over the top of it, and took a survey of the man of business, who was an elderly, pimply-faced, vegetable-diet sort of man, in a black coat, dark mixture trousers, and small black gaiters; a kind of being who seemed to be an essential part of the desk at which he was writing, and to have as much thought or sentiment.

  Charles Dickens

  Reading, Writing, Character

  Charles Dickens (1870). “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”, p.165

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Talking things over has its place in an organization [but] so-called conferences are being grossly overdone. One executive stops at the desk of another to tell him, perhaps, about the wonderful score he made at golf on Saturday afternoon. This chin-chin immediately becomes a conference, and neither the office boy nor the telephone operator must disturb either gentleman. More idle gossip is indulged in at many business conferences these days than an old wives' sewing circle would be guilty of.

  B. C. Forbes

  Golf, Boys, Talking

  4 Copy quote

• 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?

  Caroline Paul

  Running, Baby, Morning

  6 Copy quote

• When Im 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.

  Ruth Ozeki

  Writing, Irritation, Up Early

  5 Copy quote

• The way I see it, more people are wired with broadband from 9 to 5 during the day than watch TV at night. So therefore isn't the real prime time 9 to 5? Playing games at your desk - that's the new prime time, isn't it?

  Mark Burnett

  Real, Night, Playing Games

  "Who Gets Games? Mark Burnett" by Clive Thompson, www.wired.com. August 14, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Mona Simpson

  Writing, White, Ties

  4 Copy quote

• On my desk, I always have a lemon or a lime drying. I love the fragrance. Also, a Staedtler eraser, a brush for the eraser and a pencil sharpener.

  Maira Kalman

  Limes, Brushes, Pencil Sharpeners

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  David Chipperfield

  Creative, Important, Workplace

  "Box clever". Interview with Steve Rose, www.theguardian.com. October 8, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  John Jeremiah Sullivan

  Father, Office, Ends

  7 Copy quote

• I saw a gray-haired man a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing.

  H. G. Wells

  Book, Writing, Men

  H. G. Wells (2013). “Delphi Collected Works of H. G. Wells (Illustrated)”, p.2056, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.

  H. L. Mencken

  Eye, Wind, Office

  6 Copy quote

• I urge pupils when studying a work and in order to master its most important aspic, the rhythmic structure, or the ordering of the time process, to do just what a conductor does with the score: to place music on the desk and to conduct the work from beginning to end as if it were played by someone else, an imaginary pianist with the conductor trying to impress him with his will, his tempo first of all, plus all the details of his performance.

  Heinrich Neuhaus

  Order, Important, Trying

  5 Copy quote

• If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

  Aaron Sorkin

  Sexy, Real, Dark

  Source: www.rollingstone.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Right now, 70 percent of the people don't have computers. And where they're needed most, people don't have them. We think this will enable anyone to own a computer. We're aiming at everybody who uses a computer as an information access device. The original idea was to build one cheaply enough to put one on every desk.

  Larry Ellison

  Thinking, Ideas, People

  5 Copy quote