Top 100 Typewriter Quotes
#1. I understand the self-loathing and the resentment, and the discipline that it takes to sit down in front of a typewriter or computer every single day, whether it's going well or not going well.
David Duchovny
#2. If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.
Tom Robbins
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.
Pauli Murray
#7. 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
#9. I'd love to maybe try writing. I don't know if I'd publish anything, but as a hobby, it's really nice. I bought a typewriter, and I really like to write on the typewriter sometimes. It's a fun little hobby.
Emma Roberts
#10. One morning I remember pulling out a small card and threading it through my typewriter. Among the words that I typed [ ... ] were these: The simple secret is this: put your trust in the Lord, do your best, then leave the rest to Him.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:
genuine clarity
genuine feeling
the right word
the exact English sentence
the eloquent detail
the rigorous dramatization of story
Richard Yates
#15. 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
#16. In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.
Douglas Adams
#17. Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
Anne Sexton
#18. I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
#19. In spite of advances in technology and changes in the economy, state government still operates on an obsolete 1970s model. We have a typewriter government in an Internet age.
Matt Blunt
#20. People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
Harlan Ellison
#22. Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the
old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops
into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do
when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays-
I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.
James N. Frey
#23. This typewriter is the only one that has listened to me throughout the years, the only one who wants to know the girl beneath my layers.
Tessa Emily Hall
#24. 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
#25. For example, a telegram is a "lightning-letter"; a wireless telegram is a "not-have-wire-lightning-communication"; a fountain-pen is a "self-flow-ink-water-brush"; a typewriter is a "strike-letter-machine". Most of these neologisms are similar in the modern languages of China and Japan.
Wolfram Eberhard
#26. I am no writer. Her sparkling eyes made my fingers write words in the sand. Her radiant smile made my pen write words in the air. Her beautiful soul made my typewriter type poems for eternity. I am no writer.
Avijeet Das
#27. 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
#28. I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.
(- Saroyan, when once asked the name of his next book.)
William, Saroyan
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. You can write a letter with a typewriter, a pencil, or a crayon. What you have to say is the important thing.
Paul Strisik
#33. 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
#34. My father was a proudly antisocial man who spent most of his time at a typewriter, reflecting negatively on his neighbors and society, throwing in things like "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind." The emphasis was on the Goddamn it. He was proud of the fact that I had no friends
Mark Vonnegut
#35. My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.
Graham Greene
#36. I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
Charles Bukowski
#37. I am aware that a computer can't create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.
Charles Bukowski
#38. I'm with you in Rockland, where we are great writers on this same dreadful typewriter.
Allen Ginsberg
#39. I had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen.
Steve Wozniak
#40. Zoe was wearing a yello batik cotton dress, her typewriter keys bracelet, plaid sneakers, and glitter in her hair, in honor of meeting such a luminous personality as Bronwyn Gilwen.
Christine Brodien-Jones
#41. I was living in a large apartment with no furniture, just a typewriter, and because I had nothing else to do with my time, it made me take my writing seriously.
Simon Van Booy
#42. First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII - and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
Douglas Adams
#43. My first typewriter cost me $75. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to earn that money, or how proud I was of that object. I wrote my first books on it. They will never be published, but that's all right.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#44. If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.
Alan Moore
#45. There was a typewriter buried alive in that horse, the one I road to get out of the flood.
Buddy Wakefield
#46. Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.
Gerald Brenan
#47. I am amazed; until the day I die I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.
Alger Hiss
#48. 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
#49. They gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week, and after a week, they only used it as a bathroom.
Robin Ince
#50. I don't consider writing a quiet, closet act.
I consider it a real physical act.
When I'm home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy.
I move like a monkey.
I've wet myself, I've come in my pants writing.
Patti Smith
#51. I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.
Ray Bradbury
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.
Jo Nesbo
#56. 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
#57. Typewriter keys can't be blamed because of what has been typed on the typewriter; the one who committed the crime is the one who used the typewriter; the one who typed on the keyboard!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#58. Writing is easy...all you have to do is sit at the typewriter and bleed. -- Ernest Hemingway
Dana Wayne
#59. 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
#60. You feel that if only you could make yourself sit down at a typewriter you could give shape to what seems merely a chain reaction of pointless disasters.
Jay McInerney
#61. I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.
Octavia E. Butler
#62. If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
Susan Sontag
#63. I don't do rewrites. I put all the pages in a pile next to the typewriter.
Francine Pascal
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. It's not very glamorous. People certainly wouldn't think so if they saw me sitting in my woolly socks at the kitchen table. Many times I sit at the typewriter and think, 'Why am I doing this?'
Penny Jordan
#67. Much as I like owning a Rolls-Royce, I could do without it. What I could not do without is a typewriter, a supply of yellow second sheets and the time to put them to good use.
John O'Hara
#68. The night was a typewriter key that got stuck and kept punching all the letters on top of the others until all that was left was a black blob. No word, no letter, no message in the night for me.
Heather O'Neill
#70. What should I do?" "Throw up in your typewriter every morning." "Yeah." "Clean up every noon.
Ray Bradbury
#71. My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.
A.K. Kuykendall
#73. My boyfriend got me a computer three years ago. I'll admit it does make things a lot easier. When I was working on a typewriter and I whited out a line, often I would choose a word to go in the space just because it fit. Now I don't have to do that.
David Sedaris
#74. When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.
Barry Lopez
#75. I'd started doing fanzines from the age of nine. I'd been doing as many copies as you can get carbon paper into an upright typewriter, and I'd try to sell them at school.
Michael Moorcock
#76. There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Sol Stein
#77. Olli punched in with the cymbal-whack of her typewriter by the alley-side window while a happy neon sign six stories down flashing Hobart and Sons' Fine Smokables got its purple light all tangled up in her eyelashes.
Catherynne M Valente
#78. 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
#79. When I write, I use an Underwood #5 made in 1920. Someone gave me an electric typewriter, but there's no use pretending you can use machinery that thinks faster than you do. An electric typewriter is ready to go before I have anything to say.
Andy Rooney
#80. I never had a typewriter. I never had any machines.
Fran Lebowitz
#81. After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.
Henry Miller
#82. Sometimes I can think of so many ways of expressing myself that I feel I'm an old typewriter, and too many keys come forward at once - and I get jammed.
Boris Johnson
#83. Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
Raymond Chandler
#84. The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.
Ray Bradbury
#85. On mobile phones: "It looks like a TV remote fucked a little typewriter and this is the bastard offspring
Richard Kadrey
#86. No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge.
Lynn Abbey
#87. The reason I was able to give up smoking was because of the computer. You couldn't lean a cigarette on a computer, like you could on a typewriter. So it just made it that much more difficult to smoke. So I quit.
Robert Stone
#88. The typewriter is indeed my passport into a world otherwise barred to me and my kind.
Suzanne Rindell
#89. I have many stories which don't make it to the computer. When I put it into the computer I make some changes and often add a few sentences here and there. I like the typewriter for first drafts because it means you can't change anything right away, you just have to put it all down.
Arthur Bradford
#90. The worst kind of censorship is the kind that takes place in your own mind before you sit down to a typewriter.
Paddy Chayefsky
#91. My aunt got me interested in journalism - she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, 'Play like you're a writer.'
Dan Jenkins
#94. When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.
Rory Kinnear
#95. You don't write poems sitting at a typewriter; you write them swimming or climbing a mountain or walking.
Robert Penn Warren
#96. There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets ... when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.
Charles Bukowski
#97. 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
#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 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
#100. This is not the first time that intimidation by typewriter has caused me to consider the pen.
Tom Robbins
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