Top 100 A Typewriter Quotes
#1. Especially once those poetry events began, because, yeah, the stuff was still on the page, but the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.
Vito Acconci
#2. I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.
Roger Zelazny
#3. Why should I run all the way down to 17th St. to buy dirty, badly made books whenI can buy clean, beautiful ones
from you without leaving the typewriter? From whereI sit,London's a lot closer than 17th Street.
Helene Hanff
#4. (I'm not online.) I don't have a fax. I don't go in for any of that stuff. The typewriter is as far as I went.
Walter Kaylin
#5. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you've made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
Peter Thiel
#6. I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.
Kevin Spacey
#7. I didn't know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.
Mona Simpson
#8. I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Anne Sexton
#9. I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don't have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels - I love to write on my laptop!
Edan Lepucki
#10. I didn't even have a computer until like 10 years ago. I was still using a typewriter until 2002.
Beck
#11. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.
Alec Soth
#12. Defunct, adj.
You brought home a typewriter for me.
David Levithan
#13. The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.
Pablo Neruda
#14. There is, however, a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like part of the act.
Tom Robbins
#15. I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.
Wole Soyinka
#16. Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.
Lemony Snicket
#17. Here is a pen and here is a pencil, here's a typewriter, here's a stencil, here's a list of today's appointments, and all the flies in all the ointments, the daily woes that a man endures
take them, George, they're yours!
Ogden Nash
#18. Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.
Red Smith
#19. I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. ("Advance Notice")
Richard Matheson
#20. Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper ... sharp pencils ... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to the desk ... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter ... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.
Jeff MacNelly
#21. Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.
Tom Stoppard
#22. I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don't function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I'm even ready to write.
Wole Soyinka
#23. In my fairly disorganized life, yellow stickies are too easily lost, and as for software, I try to avoid using my computer as much more than a typewriter and a post office. I rely on my lifelong habit of daydreaming to spin my stories.
Julia Glass
#24. So many people spend years (and money) studying to be doctors, lawyers, actors, dancers, business executives and scientists - when you're an author, you can be any of these things, and you don't need a degree or certificate; all you need is an imagination, a dream and an open mind.
Rebecca McNutt
#25. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway,
#26. The addition of the typewriter to the printing-press has given a new and horrible impetus to the spread of half-baked thought.
John Dos Passos
#27. When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.
Sam Shepard
#28. Something mystical happens to every writer who goes to the Masters for the first time, some sort of emotional experience that results in a search party having to be sent out to recover his typewriter from a clump of azaleas.
Dan Jenkins
#29. On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter.
Dorothy Parker
#30. I've got to get back to the typewriter, I thought. Art takes discipline. Any asshole can chase a skirt. I drank, thinking about it. At
Charles Bukowski
#31. I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.
Patti Smith
#32. for the first time in a popular novel I was reading about wrongdoing by the then-sacred institution, the FBI. I was reading open criticism and accusation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. I was reading it not from the typewriter of a young radical but from that of an old novelist.
Rex Stout
#33. I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby.
Augusten Burroughs
#34. I am not a new journalist, whatever that is. I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.
Nora Ephron
#35. I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.'
John Sayles
#36. Writing. It's a trivial pursuit, hardly worth the effort, inconsequential on any cosmic level. It's just blood and sweat and guts and bone hauled out of our bodies and fed through a typewriter to slosh all over the platen.
Kim Newman
#37. I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.
Richard Greenberg
#38. The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
#39. Sometimes I get the sense that it's all "internal" ... Maybe that's why I lived alone and did nothing for three years ... (The man hardly ever washed, he didn't need a typewriter, all he had to do was sit in that shabby armchair for things to flee of their own accord)
Roberto Bolano
#40. Your idea of bliss is to wake up on a Monday morning knowing you haven't a single engagement for the entire week. You are cradled in a white paper cocoon tied up with typewriter ribbon.
Edna Ferber
#41. At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity.
Mark Twain
#42. My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I'm sitting in front of a typewriter.
Gary Reilly
#43. Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.
I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.
Billy Collins
#44. Gavin said that writing novels with a PC was supposed to be easier than writing with a typewriter and bond paper, or with a pen and foolscap, or with a chisel and a granite obelisk imported from Greece. I shook my head with pity as he related this canard to me.
Gary Reilly
#45. If a young aspirant had a modicum of skill and a busy typewriter she or he would sooner or later get a foothold in one of the magazines and a leaping start on the ladder upward.
James A. Michener
#46. To say, "Well, I write when I really get into it" is a bunch of bull. Put the paper in the typewriter, stare at it a long time, get snowblindness if you have to, but write something.
Erma Bombeck
#47. Upon learning that Hall was the man who had invented the typewriter she used so often, the girl put her arms around his neck and gave him a huge hug and kiss. Forever afterward, whenever Hall told this story of how he met Helen Keller, tears would fill his eyes.
Erik Larson
#49. It's bad to get up early, stand at your typewriter and work, then find it's nothing and take a bottle to bed.
Ray Bradbury
#50. I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
Joan Didion
#51. You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#52. I don't use a typewriter, I write longhand, with a pencil. Essentially I'm a horizontal writer. I think better when I'm lying down.
Truman Capote
#53. I write exclusively using computers. Pens and typewriters can fsck right off - I wrote my first half million words in my teens on a manual typewriter (had to trade it for a new one due to keys snapping from metal fatigue) so I am not a pen or typewriter fetishist.
Charles Stross
#54. It's very simple ... this banging around with a camera and typewriter as a business is just one helluva lot of fun.
David Douglas Duncan
#55. I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface.
David Mamet
#56. When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he's nobody's friend.
Theodore White
#57. When I write a novel, I am God at my own typewriter, and there is nobody in between. But when I write a screenplay, it must be a compromise because there are so many elements which are outside the writer's province.
Leigh Brackett
#58. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
J.K. Rowling
#59. When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody's embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer or drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket.
John Dos Passos
#60. I'm a relic, and things were a lot different when I was fifteen and sixteen. There were no cell phones, no laptops ... I learned to type on an actual typewriter.
Patrick Carman
#62. I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.
John Darnielle
#63. Such a sky. The widest she'd ever seen. Even more than the long bow of the shoreline and the eternal spread of the sea, it was the sky Betsy could not fold into her understanding, the cliffs and hillocks of the land overturned, sculpted into the stony clouds and softened with the promise of light.
Alison Atlee
#64. You get attached to the way you write, and I'm attached to notebooks. That's where I really write the plays. Just two or three pages at a time, then I transfer to the typewriter and rewrite while I type.
Neil Simon
#65. My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.
Alice Walker
#66. I have had the irreplaceable opportunity of learning my profession with the proper tools, the most important of which is not a pencil or a typewriter, but the necessary time to think before using them.
Moss Hart
#67. What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.
R.M. Engelhardt
#68. Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.
Gioconda Belli
#69. Words, to me, are the same as an instrument is to a musician. I never know where this typewriter is going to take me until I begin. I never know what I'm feeling until I read over what I have written.
Tessa Emily Hall
#70. I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper.
Shelby Foote
#71. A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
Marshall McLuhan
#72. One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!
Louis L'Amour
#73. I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness ... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.
Charles Krauthammer
#74. In the 1980s, in the communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government. You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter. And this was done so the government could track where text was coming from.
Mikko Hypponen
#75. While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
Billy Collins
#77. I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
Ernest Hemingway,
#78. I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.
Alan Furst
#79. I am convinced that if stories such as these have any lasting value, it is in revealing the kind of work young pulp-writers were doing in those days when rates were low and one had to make a typewriter smoke in order to keep eating.
Hugh B. Cave
#80. I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
Tennessee Williams
#81. Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn't disturb it.
Lillian Hellman
#82. With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.
Paul Auster
#83. Yes, I felt very small. The typewriter seemed larger than a piano, I was less than a molecule. What could I do? I drank more.
-pg 237
Albert Sanchez Pinol
#84. I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.
Frederik Pohl
#85. There is a crack opening up in the middle of the kitchen table. The typewriter and the secrets box are too heavy for it. They're pulling the table down. They're opening up a hole in the floor. The whole room rips apart. There it is, large as life. Our lives are being blown wide open.
Moira Fowley-Doyle
#86. Any man who undertakes to write a play is either a damned fool or a hero, I don't know which. When you write a book, you pull it out of the typewriter and that's that. When you write a play you've got to go on with the producer and the director and the actors and the rehearsals and the ...
Rex Stout
#87. You can have the finest pen, typewriter, or computer, but without a set of eyes that truly see the world, you might as well have none of it.
Thurman P. Banks Jr.
#88. If you're a photographer, they give you a camera. If you're a writer, they give you a typewriter. If you're an umpire, they give you an unseen object and they call it a strike zone, and nobody seems to agree with you no matter what you call.
Doug Harvey
#89. My dad is a writer, and to see him always in front of a typewriter gave me the inspiration to write. He was my idol, my hero. I wanted to be just like him.
Shakira
#90. To Nick's mind, a corpse was just a thing, no different than a chair or typewriter or a rug. A corpse was just an inanimate thing which filled space.
Stephen King
#91. I looked inside my typewriter. There's a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.
Helen Oyeyemi
#92. I like the idea of being a novelist. I picture myself on the coast, the wind in my hair, horses galloping around me as I sit at my typewriter in the middle of a field ...
Sara Cox
#93. I have been under considerable pressure to buy at least a laptop computer. I have always turned the suggestions down for the reason that I have never done creative work on a typewriter. There is to me a lack of empathy.
Winston Graham
#94. I have a love/hate relationship with just about all technology in my life. My first typewriter in particular. I had a helluva time putting new ribbon on it.
Eric Stoltz
#95. Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.
Anne Rivers Siddons
#96. He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.
A. E. Hotchner
#97. Key to women's ascent was the typewriter. Invented in 1867 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the original model was decorated with floral decals and mounted on a treadle table, like a sewing machine; promoters proclaimed it perfect for a woman's "nimble fingers.
Kate Bolick
#98. One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.
Pauli Murray
#99. I was a radioman when I first went into the Navy, so I learned to type by taking Morse code. So I was using the typewriter from day one. My handwriting wasn't any good anyway.
Robert Stone
