In the two-room flat where I live in Japan, I try to take time every day to step away from the bombardment of e-mails and opportunities and papers around my desk, for an hour, and just sit on our 30-inch terrace in the sun, reading something sustaining, whether 'The Age of Innocence' or the latest by Colm Toibin.
My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.
It's rare that I'm able to get to my desk in the morning without stopping halfway there, turning around, and going in the opposite direction because of a pressing need to straighten all the pictures on the walls, floss my teeth a second time, and make certain that there really are 100 postage stamps in the roll of stamps I bought yesterday.
At my first Olympics, I didn't have a contract, and I wasn't making any money. After my first Olympics, I was working at 24 Hour Fitness at the front desk. I would go to practice in the morning, run home, shower, grab some food and then go straight to work. I didn't get off of work until 10 or 11 o'clock at night.
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.
I did a lot of freelance desk publishing jobs when I graduated from college. I sort of earned a living doing that while I was writing plays, which was what I wanted to do. My hope was to become a playwright.
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.
When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle.
I thought if I really wanted to be serious about writing, I should make my own desk.
I never plan a structure. I like surprises. I'm quite disciplined and sit at my desk every day and just write.
There's already a marriage clock, a career clock, a biological clock. Sometimes being a woman feels like standing in the lobby of a hotel, looking at the dials depicting every time zone in the world behind the front desk - except they all apply to you, and all at once.
Dub has been a big influence in terms of production. It's inspired so many people and so much music - in terms of music where mixing desk was the instrument. Central to that is the echo chamber, and I think there's a little bit of a romantic thing there.
I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.
I've never sent an email in my life. My kids laugh. I often hand the phone to them and say, 'Can you text this message to somebody.' I don't even have a computer on my desk.
I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.
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.
I didn't have a desk to write 'Red Queen' on, so I got a nice writing desk.
More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.
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.
This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.
I love travelling full stop - so while I've had some harrowing instances, I never look at them negatively. Memories are made when you're travelling - not when you're chained to your desk.
I have this vision of maybe going the way of Bill Kurtis and, I think, Tom Brokaw, to a certain extent - the ability to not be tied to the desk anymore, but to do projects that are meaningful to you.
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?
The biggest boss has the clearest desk.
Throughout my career as a lawyer, teacher and labor leader, books have remained my constant companion - stuffed into a briefcase, overflowing on my bedside table, stacked on my desk at work. Books have carried me to distant worlds, opened new doors and made me feel empathy, compassion, anger, fear, joy, acceptance - and everything in between.
I want to die at my desk.
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.
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?
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.
Because I am kind of distracted, I don't tend to sit at my desk 9 to 5. It can be two hours a day, or, when I'm in the final editing stages, it can be 14 hours a day.
I write while my son is at school. At about 7:45 A.M., I walk him there, with the dogs, then walk them for another forty minutes or so, go home and chain myself to the desk a little before 9 A.M., and try not to be distracted until I hear my son plunge through the front door at about 3 P.M.
It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
For me, it's almost a 24/7 process. It's not like I only think when I'm in the office sitting at my desk.
Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most of all it calls for an act of displacement. 'To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way,' is Richard Holmes's version.
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.
