Longhand Quotes

#1. I do first draft in longhand, which saves a lot of rewriting. I try to get a certain amount done each day. Don't always, but I try. Then I clean up in the rewrites.

Harry Turtledove

#2. 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

#3. I've been working on my autobiography, just pecking away in longhand. The more you write, the more you remember. The more you remember, the more detail you recall. It's not all pleasant!

Pat Morita

#4. I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.

Colm Toibin

#5. My first five novels were written longhand. So were hosts of short stories.

Jane Lindskold

#6. I'm not aware of a cadence when writing, but I hear it after. I write in longhand, and that helps. You're closer to it, and you have to cross things out. You put a line through it, but it's still there. You might need it. When you erase a line on a computer, it's gone forever.

Elmore Leonard

#7. I don't have any particular rituals, I sometimes like to write in longhand when I'm searching for ideas but I do the vast majority by typing, I can't always keep up with my thoughts longhand. I'm not a coffee shop writer because I feel obliged to order more coffee and then I end up over-caffeinated.

Erin Morgenstern

#8. I write all over the house. Because I write in longhand, I can go anywhere I want ... I have some notebooks here and there, and then I type it in and pull it out, and I do the revisions all over the place.

Sue Miller

#9. I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I'm doing fiction.

Gore Vidal

#10. I write every day weekdays for about 5 hours, mostly longhand on legal pads. It has gotten neither harder nor easier, sadly or happily.

Daniel Handler

#11. What happened to romance? sappy soppy longhand love letters.

Alex Flinn

#12. I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That's so many pages longhand.

William Golding

#13. All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

Martin Amis

#14. I usually begin a poem in longhand. I like to sit where I have a nice view, ideally, although I worked on haiku this weekend at an airport. I'm not one to romanticize inspiration. I try to get to the work.

Pat Mora

#15. I do not belong to this world. I continue to write everything in longhand. If I have to see something on the Internet, I ask my secretary or students. I am lucky, because I have people who do it for me.

Elie Wiesel

#16. Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.

David Markson

#17. In fact, whenever I read something as complicated as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and think about his having written it in longhand, I am not merely awed - the thought gives me a headache.

Thomas B. Sawyer

#18. I do a lot of revising on paper. Sometimes I think I should just write longhand - what I type reads very different once I print it out.

Sara Shepard

#19. I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

Carlos Fuentes

#20. The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.

Jonathan Dee

#21. The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.

J.G. Ballard

#22. The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#23. I don't read anything electronically. I don't write electronically, either - except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter.

John Irving

#24. I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.

Alan Furst

#25. I always write my first draft in longhand, in lined notebooks. I move around the house, sitting where I like, and watch the words spool out in front of me, actually taking a lot of pleasure in the way they look in my strange handwriting on the page.

Sue Miller

#26. I am somebody who usually writes out the rough draft in longhand. Then I type it into the computer, and that is where I do my editing. I find that if I write it on the computer, I go too quick. So I like getting that first draft out and then typing it in; you are less self-conscious about it.

Barack Obama

#27. Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that.

Steven Hall

#28. I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.

James Salter

#29. Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.

Geraldine Brooks

#30. I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.

Joyce Carol Oates

#31. I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

Lauren Groff

#32. I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.

Joyce Carol Oates

#33. 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

#34. I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

John Irving

#35. I write longhand; I make changes longhand, and I have an assistant who types it up. She lives 70 yards away. Every afternoon, I have a case I leave out on the porch, and she brings it back the next morning.

Donald Hall

#36. I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.'

Rick Bragg

#37. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

Lily King

#38. I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.

Joseph Heller

#39. At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, 'Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.'

Pete Hamill

#40. I write longhand on legal pads, about half at home and half in cafes. I drink a lot of water and eat a lot of raw carrots.

Daniel Handler

#41. By the time I sit down ready to write, I've done a lot of longhand and a lot of note collecting along the way.

Jill McCorkle

#42. 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,

#43. If the pen really is mightier than the sword then you guys better watch out, because I wrote my whole 700,000 w0rd trilogy in longhand!

M.R. Mathias

#44. I write my novels longhand. I love the feeling of writing; I love to see pen on paper. It feels more creative than typing, and it's a more visual process for me - I can picture the entire scene in my head and am merely writing what I see.

Cecelia Ahern

#45. When I was in high school, I started writing a serial novel, longhand, set in the Arthurian mythos, and influenced not incidentally by Marion Zimmer Bradley's 'The Mists of Avalon.'

Greg Rucka

#46. I always write on unlined typing paper and write the first draft in longhand, using cheap Bic pens. I try to write about four pages a day, which usually yields a first draft in six months. I don't plot ahead of time, so I'm flying by the seat of my pants for the first draft.

Tess Gerritsen

#47. My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8 A.M. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain.

Tracy Chevalier