Top 100 Quotes About The Typewriter
#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. The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!
Allen Ginsberg
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. (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
#6. I'd had the picture of John Lennon in my room all the time I was at gymnas and proceeded to hang it on the wall behind the typewriter.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#7. 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
#8. The secret of successful writing lies in striking the right keys on the typewriter.
Evan Esar
#9. 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
#10. I enjoy the process of writing. The torment comes in getting my bottom on the chair and in front of the typewriter.
Caryl Rivers
#11. Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.
T. S. Eliot
#12. 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
#13. In the future the way that Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed.
Alger Hiss
#14. For decades I'd flit from drawing table to typewriter to guitar with no sense of strain or contradiction. They all exercised the same psychic muscle (the Imagination), and working in one medium refreshed my appetite for the others.
Peter Blegvad
#15. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.
Alec Soth
#16. The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.
Pablo Neruda
#17. 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
#18. Seth: I write of love in my novels, write of it well, if my critics and fans are to be believed, but in all of my years at that typewriter, I never found the combination of words that would convey how I felt about you. You were my everything.
Lissa Bryan
#19. 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
#20. Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.
Lemony Snicket
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.
William S. Burroughs
#26. Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.
Gene Fowler
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#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. My mother wrote poetry when I was young - I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter - and my father told me inventive bedtime stories.
Eula Biss
#32. If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
William Maxwell
#33. 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
#34. But other times, I'd find her staring at the typewriter with something that could only be described as hate.
Steve Cushman
#35. I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby.
Augusten Burroughs
#36. I sometimes mistake my typewriter for my teeth, because the more I bite the more my column will be read.
Sheilah Graham Westbrook
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. The more I hear of ban-the-gun legislation forming in Washington, and the more I hear it advocated from the editorial pulpit of the New York Times, the more I want my own .45 holstered within easy reach of this typewriter.
Patrick Bedard
#45. 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
#46. I write by ear. I tried writing with the typewriter, but I found it too unwieldy
Groucho Marx
#47. The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes
T. S. Eliot
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. words, literature, are not in the consciousness of the person who writes but in his fingers and the paper and the typewriter, just like the statues of Michelangelo were in the block of marble where they were revealed.
Antonio Munoz Molina
#54. 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
#55. When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he's nobody's friend.
Theodore White
#56. Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to.
William S. Burroughs
#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
#61. returned to the typewriter, angrily erasing and correcting each mistake she'd made, desperately wishing she could as easily wipe out her mental image of the man in her carriage house.
Barbara Delinsky
#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. That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.
Charles Kuralt
#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. If the thing bites down much harder I might wig out and demand beer ... stay away from the phone, watch the red arrow ... this typewriter is keeping me on my rails, without it I'd be completely adrift and weird.
Hunter S. Thompson
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Does writing exist for the typewriter, or the typewriter for writing? . . . the invention of the computer would one day make [the] argument obsolete . . . technologies exist for humans, and not vice versa.
Minae Mizumura
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
Billy Collins
#77. Because of the realities of human nature, perfect peace is achieved in two places only: in the grave and at the typewriter.
Richard M. Nixon
#78. 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,
#79. We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
Allen Ginsberg
#80. I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter ...
Larry Wall
#81. 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
#82. It's no coincidence that I began writing the day my daughter started school. I knew everything I knew before I began to write, but I was raising two children and didn't have the time to get to the typewriter.
Susan Isaacs
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story-just like the typewriter was mine.
Flannery O'Connor
#87. Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task
such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping
I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something.
Isaac Asimov
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.
Clive Barker
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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.
#94. 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
#95. In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.
Salman Rushdie
#96. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. I remember being out here at the Sunset Marquis, and whoever knocked on the door, I would take that picture that I was writing and I would put that in the typewriter, so when I had the meeting, they would say: 'Oh, you're working on it right now?'
John Sayles
