A Quote by Eric Idle

Writers tend to suffer from back problems because they spend their time bent over a desk. — © Eric Idle
Writers tend to suffer from back problems because they spend their time bent over a desk.
I like things on my desk that are pretty and make a statement. It's important that whatever is on my desk inspires me because that's where I spend a lot of my time working and creating things.
Because there still exists a significant pay gap, women tend to earn less than men over the course of their lifetimes. Compounding the problem, women tend to spend less time in the workforce than men.
Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the writer's greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to the story that must be told.
There was a sergeant at a desk. I knew he was a sergeant because I recognized the marks on his uniform, and I knew it was a desk because it's always a desk. There's always someone at a desk, except when it's a table that functions as a desk. You sit behind a desk, and everyone knows you're supposed to be there, and that you're doing something that involves your brain. It's an odd, special kind of importance. I think everyone should get a desk; you can sit behind it when you feel like you don't matter.
My books have been published all over Europe. They read me there, and I want to read them back. I also spend a lot of time in Europe, often meeting writers, and I'm sick of apologizing for the embarrassing shortage of translations in America.
Every relationship has problems but when those problems arise you have to realise that they don't mean your relationship is broken, it's just a little bent. Bent things can be fixed and like so your relationship can too. The first step however is realising that.
If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.
Modern problems proliferate and remain unsolved because we spend so much time trying to deal with societal and world problems without first dealing with family and community problems. If we organized for normal families and communities - if these two groups provided the functions they are designed for - world problems would diminish and fade out in two or three generations.
I'm not one for sitting around listening to my own music, because I tend to cringe and think that I could have done better. I also suffer from red light syndrome quite a lot. I tend to narrow my thinking when the red light goes on to record. Instead of just relaxing and playing and emoting, I think of time being wasted so I won't take a chance on something. Consequently, when I hear it back, I think, "Why the hell did I play it so safe on that piece of music when I could have really opened up?" Well, it's because of not wanting to make a mistake.
Women, as the minority, have to prove their worth all the time. That's the reason we tend to over-prepare, over-study, over-anticipate. I think it's the case with many women leaders. We tend to over do it.
Buffon said unreservedly, "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme." To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk."
I'm writing all the time. I tend to work on at least two books simultaneously. I'll spend time with one, and then I'll spend time with the other. Finishing takes whatever time it takes.
Because I spend so much time traveling, I tend to do most of my reading on the same iPad on which I write. For me, it's words, not paper, that matter most in the end. This practice has had the additional benefit of greatly reducing the time I spend storming through the house, defaming the mysterious forces who 'hid my book.'
I really need to know where I'm going with fiction to write it in a way that at least I'm happy with. And I really think that a lot of fiction books end badly because terrific writers said, "I'll just figure it out" and plunge in, but have created so many problems that they are kind of impossible to solve. I mean, I'm talking really good writers do this and you can tell when they got to the end they either had to do something preposterous or they just don't really resolve things. So for fiction I spend a lot more time outlining and for humor I really don't do much of it.
The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.
We are unlikely to spend our last moments regretting that we didn't spend enough of our lives chained to a desk. We may instead find ourselves rueing the time we didn't spend watching our children grow, or with our loved ones, or travelling, or on the cultural or leisure pursuits that bring us happiness.
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