Alain De Botton

For years I was very smug about my one second commute from my bed to my desk, and that was a very nice thing to actually to be able to work in the same place that I lived, but as I grew older, got married, had children that became less and less possible, and finally I took the decision that I really had to move out of the home and so ended up renting a flat, and that’s where I’ve ended up now, and it really is a place that I just come to work.

The dominant feature of the room are probably pictures of my children. I’ve got two sons and they’re very dear little chaps and I like to look at them. I’ve also got a few postcards of paintings that I particularly like. 

There are books that I’m using while writing a book and I’ll be quite practical about those and they tend to move around as I move from writing one book to another, and then there are other sorts of books that I might just call books for inspiration, i.e. they’re there to lend me courage. They’re the sort of books that I aspire to write, by the sort of writers that I deeply admire and they provide a kind of anchor for my own ambitions and are there in moments of crisis to, to lend me hope. 

I think the beginning of a day when I know I have a big and crucial chunk of writing to do is frightening. There’s fear. I can certainly see how one might become an alcoholic writing because there is fear and, and so you sort of want to avoid it at all costs, and the fear really boils down to this. I know there’s something critical I have to say, what happens if I can’t get it together to actually say it. What happens if I can’t do justice to the thoughts that I’ve had during the night. 

While I was at Heathrow Airport I had a desk that was perhaps the polar opposite of where I am now. It was a desk positioned, about the same size desk, but it was positioned right in the middle of Terminal Five Departures, an incredibly busy place. So writing in a busy terminal, it was the equivalent of writing in a busy café I suppose. It’s good for certain sorts of writing. I think it’s probably best for pre-writing, when you’re just getting your thoughts together, but you’re not necessarily doing the hard labour of actually assembling complete sentences. 

People often say that writers, or they assume that writers should be working in, in inspiring places. People often say, you know, “you want to go and work by the sea” or “wouldn’t you want to work, you know, looking over a mountain or something?”. My real feeling is that the best space for me to write is a completely neutral as it were boring space. Writing is all about trying to dig inside and trying to get something out, rather than to get inspiration from outside. I think people often get it wrong when they think of writers, they think that writers need beautiful places in order to write beautiful things. Writers might need to have seen beautiful things somewhere along the way, but that’s not to be confused with actually being in a beautiful room.