I sit down at my desk pretty early in the morning and write all day until about 4 or 5 p.m.
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
I don't like to leave anything unfinished on my desk before I travel.
And then, 'Why is a raven like a writing desk?' Those things just became so important to the character. You realize that the more you read it, if I read the book again today, I'd find 100 other things that I missed last time. It's a constantly changing book.
Once when Larry the Cable Guy was on Conan's show, Conan O'Brien was so offended by Larry's material, he had to walk away from the desk he was so offended.
I was living under a desk in West Hollywood. It was a closet that I shared with another comic. I was shocked when they called me to come in to try out for the show. The chances of me getting on a TV show and winning it is like one-in-a-million. I had only been doing comedy for six years at that point, so I was basically considered an open mic-er or maybe a feature act once in awhile.
The productiveness of any meeting depends on the level of thought given to the agenda in advance, and you should never leave a meeting without writing a follow-up list with each item assigned to one person. And go outside. All the big ideas are on the outside. You'll never have a creative idea at your desk.
I learned to write with my desk in the living room, next to the TV. But mostly in my head, and I try to be able to do it under any circumstances.
I have three boxes on my desk: In, Out, and Too Hard.
This is often the way it is in physics - our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort.
Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.
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.
This famous quote hangs over my desk, as well as the desks of many people with the hubris and optimism to believe they can change the world for the better. It seems implausible, yet time and again history has proven it true. Virtually every major shift in cultural history can trace its origins to the work of a small group, often gathered around an innovative thinker or body of thought.
A lot of times I make people better by getting stupid, distracting, bureaucratic stuff off their desk. That's an incredibly easy way to make a senior person more productive.
It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.
I have never found, in anything outside of the four walls of my study, an enjoyment equal to sitting at my writing desk with a clean page, a new theme, and a mind awake.
Providing jobs at three flat factories in Malawi to make school desks for kids who have never seen desks, and providing scholarships for girls to go to high school who would never otherwise be able to go to high school, is by far the most important work I do.
Even when I'm just sitting at my desk, I have to get up every twenty minutes or so and walk around, walk around, walk around, and then I can go back to the page. I can't just sit there for hours at a time. Language comes out of the body as much as the mind.
I wish that something interesting would come across the desk. I'm bored by what people think is interesting.
Writers tend to suffer from back problems because they spend their time bent over a desk.
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.
As a kid, I used to come to our offices and play under the desks of people I now work with, or who work for me. I would come in and play with fabrics and make little clothes for my Snoopy. People here feel like family. But if I couldn't make a difference, I wouldn't be here. My father wouldn't want me to be here.
I've never really had a desk job, but I've died one day at a time all over the place.
I loved journalism until the day my journalism teacher, a man I revered, came by my desk and said, 'Are you planning on going into journalism?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'I wouldn't.' I said, 'Well, why not?' He said, 'You can't make a living.'
I've never had a really creative idea sitting at my desk. All the big ideas that made a difference happened when I was playing outside.
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