Writers' Rooms/ The ba-humbug, give me my books beat marches on.

John Mortimer
I try to write as early as possible in the morning, and aim to write 1,000 words a day.
I stop at lunchtime, have a drink and then fall asleep.

Jonathan Safran Foer
While the facilities here are vastly (and suspiciously) inferior in every way, the most remarkable difference between this library and the one in Manhattan is to be found in what's considered acceptable behavior. In Brooklyn, people regularly carry on cellphone conversations at their desks... regularly have conversations (which are regularly about illicit things), regularly fall asleep... regularly prepare and eat meals...and get in scarily heated arguments with the roaming policemen about what's acceptable behaviour. It's my best argument for why Brooklyn is the superior borough:
it's real.
(Caveat: Outside the library, I found that the seat of my bicycle had been stolen. Is this a great country or what?)

Virginia Woolf
This was where Leonard came out in July 1931 to tell her that The Waves, which he had just finished reading, was a masterpiece. This was where she struggled for months on end with The Years, trying to cut down on her smoking (from six or seven to one a morning in 1934). This was where, on Friday March 28, 1941, on a cold spring morning, she wrote a farewell letter to Leonard before walking down to the River Ouse, leaving her papers in disarray, with several revisions of her last essay on Mrs Thrale in the waste-paper basket and immense numbers of typewritten sheets lying about the room.

photos and text from the Guardian's Writers' Rooms series