Quotes About Typewriters

#1. Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.

Thomas Pynchon

#2. A place that proves if you get enough talented people in a room, one or two are bound to offer some helpful advice. Kind if like monkeys with typewriters.

A. Lee Martinez

#3. I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it's sort of crappy now. It's always just you and the page. That doesn't change.

Colson Whitehead

#4. We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Robert Wilensky

#5. CUSTOMER: You know how they say that if you gave a thousand monkeys typewriters, then they'd eventually churn out really good writing? BOOKSELLER: ... yes. CUSTOMER: Well, do you have any books by those monkeys? BOOKSELLER: ...

Jen Campbell

#6. 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

#7. I wasn't prepared for this big room with clattering typewriters and teletype printers. You could hardly hear yourself think.

Ray Kroc

#8. You have typewriters, presses. And a huge audience. How about raising hell?

Jenkin Lloyd Jones

#9. Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.

James Lee Burke

#10. There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.

Ian Hart

#11. Nothing is more frustrating than sitting in an office amid typewriters and mimeographers when you know what deus ex machina means.

Florence King

#12. If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#13. We are often miserable at our desk or typewriters, but not happy away from them.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

#14. I'm all for typewriters, with instant carbon copies, and seeing films in cinemas.

Olivia De Havilland

#15. Vine, the Ringling Brothers circus, Friendster, horseshoes, pay phones, typewriters, etc. Things go out of business. Don't think it can't happen to Madison Avenue. Adapt or die.

Andrew Essex

#16. I'm kind of a Luddite myself. I've got a bunch of typewriters at home. I'm a big fan of old technology.

Kerry Bishe

#17. The manufacturers of mechanical typewriters believed that they had developed sufficiently when they introduced electric typewriters. Then came the PC, and the deeply traditional makers of typewriters disappeared from the market.

Norbert Reithofer

#18. I have two vintage typewriters. One just about works and the other hasn't a hope in hell, bless it. But they're both beautiful, and they'll stay with me just as long as there's a roof over my head.

Matt Roper

#19. There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings -and all the people sleeping in the slums.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#20. I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all - what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page - do they want someone to write on it?

Wilfrid

#21. His office led into a larger one in which two women of indeterminate age were attacking typewriters as though they were engaged in a race and the loser was to be executed the next morning.

Victoria Clayton

#22. There is a special department of Hell for students of probability. In this department there are many typewriters and many monkeys. Every time that a monkey walks on a typewriter, it types by chance one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Bertrand Russell

#23. I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#24. People die from typewriters falling on their heads.

Jonathan Davis

#25. The iPhone is not and never was a phone. It is a pocket-sized computer that obviates the phone. The iPhone is to cell phones what the Mac was to typewriters.

John Gruber

#26. If a man can make typewriters better than anyone else, let us, in the name of common sense, keep him on the job of making typewriters.

William Feather

#27. enough monkeys with enough typewriters can give you Shakespeare, so

Nat Kozinn

#28. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.

Ray Bradbury

#29. How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies.

Margaret Atwood

#30. 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

#31. I enjoy the process of writing. The torment comes in getting my bottom on the chair and in front of the typewriter.

Caryl Rivers

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. I didn't even have a computer until like 10 years ago. I was still using a typewriter until 2002.

Beck

#35. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.

Alec Soth

#36. The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.

Pablo Neruda

#37. 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

#38. You can lie to your wife or your boss, but you cannot lie to your typewriter. Sooner or later you must reveal your true self in your pages.

Leon Uris

#39. Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.

Red Smith

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. I sometimes mistake my typewriter for my teeth, because the more I bite the more my column will be read.

Sheilah Graham Westbrook

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. I write by ear. I tried writing with the typewriter, but I found it too unwieldy

Groucho Marx

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#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. 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

#56. 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

#57. That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.

Charles Kuralt

#58. 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

#59. I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter ...

Larry Wall

#60. 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

#61. I had one typewriter for 50 years, but I have bought seven computers in six years. I suppose that's why Bill Gates is rich, and Underwood is out of business.

Andy Rooney

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.

Pauli Murray

#65. 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

#66. I had an old typewriter and a big idea.

J.K. Rowling

#67. You know ... that a blank wall is an apalling thing to look at ...
The wall of a museum - a canvas - a piece of film - or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something - that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you.

Edward Steichen

#68. There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.

Tom Robbins

#69. Photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it.

Ezra Stoller

#70. Gazing at the typewriter in moments of desperation I console myself with three thoughts. Alcohol at six, dinner at eight, and to be immortal you've got to be dead.

Gyles Brandreth

#71. I seat myself at the typewriter and hope, and lurk.

Mignon G. Eberhart

#72. You will never work through writer's block if you walk away from your typewriter. That will only make it easier to walk away the next time.

James N. Frey

#73. All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter ... a marble-topped bedroom washstand table made a good place; the dining-room table between meals was also suitable.

Agatha Christie

#74. I love to photograph the tools of one's trade: Duncan Grant's paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.

Patti Smith

#75. When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.

Philip Roth

#76. My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.

William Maxwell

#77. You can write a letter with a typewriter, a pencil, or a crayon. What you have to say is the important thing.

Paul Strisik

#78. There's no agony like [getting started]. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.

Agatha Christie

#79. I am aware that a computer can't create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.

Charles Bukowski

#80. There was a typewriter buried alive in that horse, the one I road to get out of the flood.

Buddy Wakefield

#81. Bless all useful objects,
the spoons made of bone,
the mattress I cook my dreams upon,
the typewriter that is my church
with an altar of keys always waiting.

Anne Sexton

#82. They gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week, and after a week, they only used it as a bathroom.

Robin Ince

#83. The image of the reporter as a nicotine-stained Quixote, slugging back Scotch while skewering city hall with an expose ripped out of a typewriter on the crack of deadline, persists despite munificent evidence to the contrary.

Paul Gray

#84. Like Paul Kraston said, all I ask in life is a water bed, a TV and a typewriter. Well, I'll just have an ordinary bed, a TV and a guitar.

John Lennon

#85. And sometimes I sit down at my typewriter and I think not of someone cause there isn't anyone to think about and i wonder is it worth it

Nikki Giovanni

#86. My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don't schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

Ray Bradbury

#87. I can write faster on a typewriter than you can on a computer. I do 120 words a minute, and you can't do that on a computer.

Ray Bradbury

#88. When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

Martin Amis

#89. You could walk around behind the typist and read the text, which was about hearing, and what you heard was the sound of the typewriter. Of course, this was a pre-electric typewriter, a typewriter that made noise.

Vito Acconci

#90. I write on the typewriter. I like it because I like the feeling of making something with my hands. I like pressing the key and a letter comes up and is printed on a piece of paper. I can understand that.

David McCullough

#91. You don't ask a writer what typewriter he uses.

Man Ray

#92. The best kind of writing, and the biggest thrill in writing,
is to suddenly read a line from your typewriter that you
didnt know was in you.

Larry L. King

#93. A typical wine writer was once described as someone with a typewriter who was looking for his name in print, a free lunch, and a way to write off his wine cellar. It's a dated view. Wine writers now use computers.

Frank J. Prial

#94. I am not lazy.
I am on the amphetamine of the soul.
I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.

Anne Sexton

#95. Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder - and turn quickly to my typewriter.

Sydney J. Harris

#96. Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.

Neil Simon

#97. I type 90 words per minute on the typewriter; I type 100 words per minute on the word processor. But, of course, I don't keep that up indefinitely - every once in a while I do have to think a few seconds.

Isaac Asimov

#98. Take a woman talking,
purging herself with rhymes,
drumming words out like a typewriter,
planting words in you like grass seed.
You'll move off.

Anne Sexton

#99. I used to go round to Aunt Mimi's house and John would be at the typewriter, which was fairly unusual in Liverpool. None of my mates even knew what a typewriter was. Well they knew what it was but they didn't hae one. Nobody had one.

Paul McCartney

#100. The worst kind of censorship is the kind that takes place in your own mind before you sit down to a typewriter.

Paddy Chayefsky