Desk Quotes (page 5)
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The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn...
Anais Nin
I had been stalking the bluebottle fly for five minutes, waiting for him to sit down. He didn't want to sit down. He just wanted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to Pagliacci. I had the fly swatter poised in midair and I was all set. There was a patch of bright sunlight on the corner of the desk and I knew that sooner or later that was where he was going to light. But when he did, I didn't even see him at first. The buzzing stopped and there he was. And then the phone rang.
Raymond Chandler
My head is like some ridiculous barn packed full of stuff I
want to write about,” she said. “Images, scenes, snatches of
words … in my mind they’re all glowing, all alive. Write! they
shout at me. A great new story is about to be born I can feel it.
It’ll transport me to some brand-new place. Problem is, once I
sit at my desk and put them all down on paper, I realize
something vital is missing. It doesn’t crystallize—no crystals,
just pebbles. And I’m not transported anywhere.
Haruki Murakami
It is perhaps an ugly comment on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. . . . An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a...
Joseph Mitchell
For concentration you need a cat...And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give you back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence is enough.
Muriel Spark
A puff of air—whuff!—hits his ears, blows out the candle. He can't be bothered relighting it, because the bourbon is taking over. He'd rather stay in the dark. He can sense Oryx drifting towards him on her soft feathery wings. Any moment now she'll be with him. He sits crouched in the chair with his head down on the desk and his eyes closed, in a state of misery and peace.
Margaret Atwood
Reading is performance. The reader-- the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk-- performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.
Ursula K. Le Guin
You go in through double swing doors. Inside the double doors there is a combination PBX and information desk at which sits one of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don't have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn...
Raymond Chandler