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.
The first pork-barrel bill that crosses my desk, I'm going to veto it and make the authors of those pork-barrel items famous all over America.
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.
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.
I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.
Eighteen holes of match play will teach you more about your foe than 18 years of dealing with him across a desk.
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.
I'm going to ask one question for everything that comes across my desk, which is, 'How is this going to create jobs?'
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.
My desk, most loyal friend thank you. You've been with me on every road I've taken. My scar and my protection.
Depending on what I'm working on, I come to the writing desk with entirely different mindsets. When I change form one to the other, it's as if another writer is on the scene.
The trick to my writing, it turned out, was doing so exclusively in bed. The minute I even dared to discipline myself and write at the desk, I produced mounds of nonsense. Yet, sitting in bed, I wrote easily, effortlessly, fluidly. I became the master of perfect indiscipline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If your desk isn't cluttered, you probably aren't doing your job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not often that a strong female role comes across one's desk, unfortunately, but it's getting better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope people know that when I'm sitting there, it's not some guy on a desk on a platform with sort of this voice-of-God approach.
I am really chained to my computer these days so I work in my bedroom, which is a room I have worked in for years and years. It is just as much an office as a bedroom, and during the day, my bed is rather like an extension of my desk.
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'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.
For a year, I was the world's worst assistant to a talent manager. I was awful at it. Really disorganized. Just not the person you want at the front desk of your office.
I'm not much given to making shamanistic remarks about all this, but I'm a great believer in the dream life. If I can carry without spilling whatever it is that drips into my head in the night to my desk, then that's valuable.
Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.
I just find that people can waste a lot of time in meetings, so I try to restrict meetings to the minimum that they need to be. But I have lots of time in my day where I am available to have informal conversations, where I grab someone to talk, and people can just walk up to my desk and talk to me.
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?
