Desk Quotes

We’ve collected the best Desk Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Jacques Plante, Bill Goldberg, Daniel Woodrell, Barbara Kingsolver, Daniel Mallory Ortberg. Use them as an inspiration.

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?

Jacques Plante

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.

Bill Goldberg

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.

Daniel Woodrell

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

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.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg

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

Bill Goldberg

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.

Bun E. Carlos

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.

Leonid I. Brezhnev

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

Hilary Mantel

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.

Graham Moore

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.

Michelle Obama

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.

Paula Patton

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.

David Alaba

Every day I would wake up and think, ‘Today is another missed opportunity to do something important.’ After enough days like this, you start feeling like you are getting old, even when you are relatively young. We are all natural entrepreneurs, and being manacled to a desk job is not for us.

Brian Chesky

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.

Jonathan Scott

The most important item on my desk is a picture of my husband and three kids making kooky faces at my niece‘s wedding. We all look silly and happy.

Shira Goodman

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.

Stephen King

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

John le Carre

I hate going out for lunch during a workday because it slows down my pace and ruins my rhythm. I prefer to eat at my desk. Actually, I wander around the design studio with a plate in my hand as I dine on, for example, salmon sashimi and a salad of tomatoes and mozzarella. I often have a bit of dark chocolate after lunch.

Tom Ford

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.

Dominik Garcia-Lorido

Over my desk hangs a poster from The Railway Children that my husband had framed for me. It is so lovely to see the children smiling as they run down the railway track.

Dinah Sheridan

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

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

Ivanka Trump

These tapes have been found, which were taken from the desk and various bootlegs. At the time we never got to hear them, they didn’t seem to be available or they just got put to one side.

Michael Giles

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.

Joy Behar

I’m going to ask one question for everything that comes across my desk, which is, ‘How is this going to create jobs?’

Gina Raimondo

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

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

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.

Adrian McKinty

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

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.

Aminatta Forna

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.

Rand Beers

I had one guy pretend to be me, go to a hotel room, and tell the people at the front desk that it was me, and then he went in and stole all of our luggage. There’s always that eager beaver that wants to be a part of the team and comes off as a sticky fly.

Les Claypool

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.

Sheryl Lee

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.

Bil Keane

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.

Stephanie Grisham

Your core holds you upright; it helps you bend and twist and jump; it helps you transfer power through your body; and it strengthens your posture, whether you are batting, sitting at a desk or running around a park.

Jos Buttler

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.

George Lopez

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.

C. Day Lewis

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.

Chelsea Cain

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

Laura Lippman

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

Anais Nin

I don’t like to leave anything unfinished on my desk before I travel.

Vijay Mallya

It’s very nice when you’re checking onto a flight and the person behind the desk suddenly upgrades your seat for you and then hands you back the boarding pass and says, ‘It’s my favorite movie.’

Nicholas Hammond

I write in an old-school paneled study in the middle of a large farmhouse in rural Iowa. I have pine floors, a big cherry desk, and a small window. The room is cluttered with papers and books and gifts from friends.

Dean Bakopoulos

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.

Jenny Nimmo

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.

Norman MacCaig

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.’

Dolph Ziggler

Tacked above my desk are photos of artists I admire – Hopper, Sargent, Twain – and postcards from beloved bookstores where I’ve spent all my time and money – Tattered Cover, Elliot Bay, Harvard Bookstore.

J. R. Moehringer

I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.

Chelsea Cain

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.

Alexa Von Tobel

Everyone is wanting to make a name for themselves, and Dominick Cruz has been doing that by talking. He’s been behind a desk, being a reporter, talking about fights.

T.J. Dillashaw

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

Elizabeth Hurley

I’m a morning person: if I don’t get up, put the coffee on and get to my desk by 8, the day has already lost a lot of its promise.

Jennifer Gilmore

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

John Isner

One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was the globe that I now keep right beside my desk.

Tess Gerritsen

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.

Regis Philbin

We pay millions of pounds to separate Catholic and Protestant children, and even more millions on attempting to bring them together as adults. You can’t make someone fear another person if they shared a desk for seven years.

Adrian Dunbar

Near my desk, I keep a large plastic carton filled with fresh notebooks and stationery of various kinds, sizes, and qualities.

Michael Dirda

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.

C. Day Lewis

I always have to go out to work even if it’s just a desk somewhere or an office or the British Library.

David Morrissey

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.

Cherie Blair

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.

Raf Simons

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.

Carlo Ancelotti

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.

Scarface

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.

Bobby Bonilla

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

Tammy Duckworth

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

Grantland Rice

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

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.

Madeleine Stowe

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

Whose leadership, whose judgment, whose values do you want in the White House when that crisis lands like a thud on the Oval Office desk?

Rahm Emanuel

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

Dylan Lauren

I can only write new words at my desk, the one I’ve owned for 25 years. When we moved to our new house I designed my office around it. I’ve written everything I’ve ever written at this desk.

Steve Berry

You’ve probably never thought about it before unless you happen to write for a living, but professional writers are doomed to spend most of their waking hours sitting by themselves at a desk, staring at a blank computer screen and waiting for lightning to strike.

Terry Teachout

Going to so many book events keeps me connected with my readership while constantly reminding me that all the long hours at the drawing desk are worthwhile.

Raina Telgemeier

You can’t run a multinational business from your desk.

Daniel Schwartz

A desk for $350 a month in a common area is not as cheap as a coffee shop. But a lot of people would say they’re empowered by that environment in a way that makes it worth it.

Miguel McKelvey

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.

James Charles

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.

Irving Stone

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.

Peggy Johnson

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.

Frank McCourt

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

Christopher Parker

I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

Bill Gates

‘Show up at the desk’ is one of the first rules of writing, but for ‘Wolf Hall’ I was about 30 years late.

Hilary Mantel

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

Amanda de Cadenet

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.

Peter Heller

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.

Ruskin Bond

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.

Erika Christensen

To be honest, I didn’t even know what the Drama Desk Awards were until I was nominated.

Spencer Kayden

With tireless hours at your desk or traveling on a plane, it’s important that you take time to stay connected to your body.

Mandy Ingber

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.

James Horner

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.

Margaret Cuomo

Every writer has their rituals. For me, it’s morning walks along the beach. And then, in my study I have a huge painting of the Black Madonna hung over my desk, and quite a few pictures of Mary around me for inspiration.

Sue Monk Kidd

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

Anais Nin

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

Harold S. Geneen

I’ll be with The Goat until the fall. Then I’ve been given three plays to look at and there have been a couple of films have come over the desk. I will probably not do either one of them.

Mercedes Ruehl

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.

Annie Dillard

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.

Lynn Coady

100

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.

Ruth Wilson

101

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?

Laurence J. Peter

102

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

103

Always be nice to the front desk staff because they can choose to make your life a living hell, and they’ll remember you.

Iliza Shlesinger

104

Tom Ford

105

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.

Erik Larson

106

I have a hard time writing, and I usually have to put a timer at my desk and put it on for an hour. But I love to illustrate, and I can hardly stop myself.

Jan Brett

107

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.

Lisa Gansky

108

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.

Colson Whitehead

109

I had visited Congressman Deal before, but I never thought I’d be sitting on the other side of the desk.

Tom Graves

110

For years, I’ve felt an obligation to harvest an animal, since all my life I’ve so mindlessly consumed them. But that was from the safety of my desk.

Rosecrans Baldwin

111

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.

John Updike

112

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

Michio Kaku

113

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.

Barbara Ehrenreich

114

Well, the thought that everybody might have a personal computer at their desk or their home was certainly not on the mainstream of anybody‘s activity at that time.

Jack Kilby

115

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.

Matt Serra

116

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.

Alvin Lee

117

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.

Andy Daly

118

Bruce Springsteen

119

But I didn’t really enjoy my secondary education that much, probably because I am a very physical person and don’t enjoy sitting at a desk all day. I just dragged myself through GCSE and A Levels, so it suited me very much to go on to drama school, which was very active.

Amanda Burton

120

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

Marina Tsvetaeva

121

A plant is the most cliche thing, but a little bit of green has a great effect on happiness. Being at a cubicle all day is not pleasing, but a little life on your desk can give you a little life, too.

Bobby Berk

122

As long as I sit at Henry Clay‘s desk, I will remember his lifelong desire to forge agreement, but I will also keep close to my heart the principled stand of his cousin, Cassius Clay, who refused to forsake the life of any human, simply to find agreement.

Rand Paul

123

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.

Jhonen Vasquez

124

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.

Ed Bradley

125

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

Chuck Pagano

126

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

Richard Branson

127

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.

Robin Marantz Henig

128

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.

Ed Bradley

129

When I go to a library and I see the librarian at her desk reading, I’m afraid to interrupt her, even though she sits there specifically so that she may be interrupted, even though being interrupted for reasons like this by people like me is her very job.

Aaron Swartz

130

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.

Jess Walter

131

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.

Marc Guggenheim

132

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.

Elaine Chao

133

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.

Neil Warnock

134

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

James Herbert

135

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

Lars Rasmussen

136

When the plane is delayed, it’s not the fault of the girl at the desk. I’m resigned to the fact that everything is out of my control and that air travel nowadays is barbaric.

Tom Conti

137

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.

Chris Christie

138

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

Gina Haspel

139

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.

John Ortberg

140

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.’

Stuart Scott

141

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.

Erica Jong

142

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.’

Regina Brett

143

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.

Jason Reitman

144

I hate tenure. Tenure allows teachers to put their feet up on the desk and possibly have a job forever. That’s why I got turned on to charter schools. It’s a business model. Every employee and every teacher will be monitored by performance.

Jalen Rose

145

To me, Microsoft is about empowerment… we are the original democratizing force, putting a PC in every home and every desk.

Satya Nadella

146

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

Jason Statham

147

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

148

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.

Matt Roper

149

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.

David M. Evans

150

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.

Conchata Ferrell

151

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.

Jimmy Kimmel

152

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

John le Carre

153

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.

Brit Marling

154

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

Fred Allen

155

Jacques Plante

156

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.

Jennifer McMahon

157

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.

Tyrone Mings

158

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.

Bil Keane

159

In fact, I spent 25 years as a reporter, swearing I would never become an editor. Sitting at a desk, watching other people go out and find the story, and then fussing with other people’s words – I just didn’t get the appeal of that.

Bill Keller

160

The Standard in Hollywood, when you check in, they have that sort of Area-like vignette behind the front desk with someone sleeping behind glass. An actual person.

Eric Goode

161

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.

Sofia Richie

162

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

163

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

Brandon T. Jackson

164

I turned 30 and decided if I was going to try acting I had better try or wind up still holding a desk job at 50.

Ted Cassidy

165

I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side.

Meghan Daum

166

The thing most consistently on my desk as I write is a cat – a different one at different times of the day. I think I’m more a part of their ritual.

Sarah Addison Allen

167

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.

Hilary Mantel

168

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.

Aerin Lauder

169

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.

Jerry Della Femina

170

Adrian Dunbar

171

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.

Howard Jacobson

172

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.

Erik Larson

173

The deadlines are much, much longer with books. When I was a reporter, a lot of times I’d come in at 8:30 a.m., get an assignment right away, interview somebody, turn the story in by 9:30, and have the finished story in the paper that landed on my desk by noon.

Margaret Haddix

174

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

Michelle Obama

175

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.

Juicy J

176

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

Bob Woodward

177

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.

Kenneth Lonergan

178

If you are a genius, you’ll make your own rules, but if not – and the odds are against it – go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper – write.

J. B. Priestley

179

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.

Wyatt Cenac

180

I really just like to be at a desk.

Tom Stoppard

181

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.

Whitley Strieber

182

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.

John Updike

183

I know there are, like, 12 rules for late night: a desk, a band. Will people take me seriously if I don’t wear a tie?

Jimmy Kimmel

184

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.

Gabe Newell

185

‘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.

Ilan Stavans

186

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.

Shigeru Miyamoto

187

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.

Wendy Davis

188

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

Ronald Reagan

189

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.

Gary Oldman

190

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.’

Louis Gossett, Jr.

191

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.

Calvin Coolidge

192

I write in my house, at my desk, where I have Christmas lights strung over it to try and convince me that I’m having a good time. I can’t really write anywhere else.

Kate DiCamillo

193

It all depends on which side of the desk you’re sitting on.

Len Wein

194

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

Harold S. Geneen

195

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.

Charlie Kimball

196

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

Fred Allen

197

I always wear a suit jacket, a smart blouse or a top, with my hair and make-up done. Under the desk, what no one knows, is that I’m wearing jeans and trainers.

Karren Brady

198

It’s a lovely feeling, just working away at the desk, putting words down, building words up… I think you have to be aware that what you’re doing is not just a private act, it’s a societal thing.

Sarah Hall

199

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

Elizabeth Hurley

200

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.

Jean-Luc Bilodeau

201

If you don’t know what to do with many of the papers piled on your desk, stick a dozen colleagues initials on them and pass them along. When in doubt, route.

Malcolm Forbes

202

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.

Walter Cronkite

203

I worked during summers on the foreign exchange desk as a dollar/yen broker for Noonan, Astley & Pierce. I used to write the chairman notes about how he could improve his business. And I met Bernie Cantor through this job.

Howard Lutnick

204

Sure, they were simple desk lamps with only a minimal amount of movement, but you could immediately tell that Luxo Jr. was a baby, and that the big one was his mother. In that short little film, computer animation went from a novelty to a serious tool for filmmaking.

John Lasseter

205

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.

Jo Koy

206

I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.

Chelsea Cain

207

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.

Alexandra Stoddard

208

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.

Tom Hanks

209

There are still journalists who risk their lives in situations of conflict, versus those who sit behind a desk at ‘News of the World’ to report on whether someone is going out with somebody or not.

Romola Garai

210

I doubted that there were Communists hiding behind every corporation desk and director‘s chair.

Gloria Swanson

211

Like, the idea that I had to spend the rest of my life behind a desk and not be able to express myself the way I wanted to express myself. To me, that is torture. I mean if people out there that do love that then more love to them, but it just wasn’t for me.

Aleister Black

212

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.

Ruth Ozeki

213

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.

Stephen King

214

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.

Makoto Shinkai

215

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.

Philip Pullman

216

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.

Jeff Koons

217

Bill Keller

218

My desk is more of a place where I set my stuff, and then I move around. If I’m at the office, I’m usually wandering around to different meeting rooms all day or taking people out or making tea. I’m rarely at my desk; it’s just a place to hang my hat.

Emily Weiss

219

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.

Jo Koy

220

I’m always writing, even when I’m not at my desk. I write on my hands. I used to write on my kids’ hands, too, but they don’t let me any more. When I’m driving I sometimes write all the way up my arms.

Jodi Picoult

221

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

James Herbert

222

I’m quite an untidy person in a lot of ways. But order makes me happy. I have to have a clear desk and a tidy desktop, with as few visual distractions as possible. I don’t mind sound distractions, but visual ones freak me out.

Joanne Harris

223

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!

Tomi Adeyemi

224

I travel probably four days a week. That’s the game of international development. You have to be at your properties. No developer is successful sitting behind their desk.

Eric Trump

225

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

226

Margaret Cuomo

227

To me, Microsoft is about empowerment… we are the original democratizing force, putting a PC in every home and every desk.

Satya Nadella

228

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.

Faith Salie

229

As a composer and as a musician I’m a true believer – and this is not to be overly diplomatic – I’m a believer that there’s artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There’s art in absolutely everything.

Darren Criss

230

The biggest boss has the clearest desk.

John Cho

231

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.

Kate Thompson

232

Though the male can be noble in reason and infinite in faculties, he is also easily amused by shiny toys, especially ones that do dumb things on his desk.

Patricia Marx

233

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.

Ron Stallworth

234

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.

Ntozake Shange

235

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.

Roald Dahl

236

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

Tom Stoppard

237

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

Victoria Aveyard

238

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

Stephen Karam

239

Writing can be a very solitary business. It’s you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

Paul Kane

240

I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don’t get when you are sitting at a desk.

Graham Swift

241

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.

Charles Krauthammer

242

This may sound funny, but as much as the ‘Today’ show matured me, it also was something of a cocoon. I’d been happy there. I never went into the boss’s office and pounded my fist on the desk, saying, ‘Give me more money! Give me a prime-time show!’

Jane Pauley

243

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.

Elizabeth McCracken

244

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.

Craig Federighi

245

You only get so much time to do something that you enjoy or love to do. If you can continue doing it, you might as well, because I don’t want to live in regret. I don’t want to be the person sitting behind a desk, wondering, ‘Did I do it right, did I finish it off, did I really give it my all?’

Troy Dumais

246

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

Christine Leunens

247

It all depends on which side of the desk you’re sitting on.

Len Wein

248

My desk is my drums.

Jaimoe

249

I enjoy what I do every minute of the day, even when the going gets tough. When I first began writing, I used to work at a desk in the bedroom, of a small development house. My three sons all under the age of 3 would come running in and out of the room every minute.

Evan Hunter

250

I cannot see myself sitting at a desk from nine to five!

Reggie Lee

251

‘V’ had just been cancelled; I was looking for a job, and the ‘Homeland‘ script came across my desk. I loved it immediately, although I thought it would end up being discovered gradually – a slow-burner, like ‘The Wire.’

Morena Baccarin

252

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

Janet Fitch

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