Typewriter Quotes

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.

I wasn’t as used to the new dumb questions, so when men I had once thought of as wise daddies now asked me ‘How do you write?’ I did not try and spill red wine in their suede pants. I would just smile and say, ‘On a typewriter in the mornings when there’s nothing else to do.’

I remember being two, maybe, and hearing my mum’s typewriter in the other room and sticking my hands under the door and screaming, ‘Mum! Mum!’ I was so angry she wouldn’t come out. I got used to it quickly.

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.

I like to believe that I don’t think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it’s whenever I feel there’s something to be put on paper. I don’t care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am amazed; until the day I die I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.

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.

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.

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.’

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

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.

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.

Most of my early work was done on typewriter. And the only way to iterate drafts was to re-type it.

When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he’s nobody’s friend.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

Using a typewriter, at times, feels more like playing piano than jotting down notes, a percussive exercise in expressing thought that is both tortuous and rewarding.

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.

In the future the way that Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed.

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.

I don’t do rewrites. I put all the pages in a pile next to the typewriter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

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.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.

I wrote a letter to the CIA on my manual college typewriter. I mailed it to CIA with my resume. I didn’t have an address. So I just put, ‘CIA. Washington, D.C.’

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.

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!

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.

My father was a TV scriptwriter. He would perform his dialogue out loud, while my mum transcribed it at the typewriter. So I grew up thinking that plucking characters out of the air was an extremely normal way to behave.

Gibson wrote ‘Neuromancer’ on a typewriter, you know, before the technology he was writing about existed.

I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter. I thought that this electric typewriter was about the most fascinating toy in the world – I liked the little bell and the sounds and the feel of the keys and especially the erase key.

I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.

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.

You know, my first three or four drafts, you can see, are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter, and I know everybody’s switching to a computer. And I’m sort of laughed at.

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.

You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.

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.

Getting to my typewriter is something I push myself to, but once I am working, I work hard.

I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.

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.

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.

It took me 20 years to buy an electric typewriter, because I was afraid it would be too sensitive. I like to bang the keys. I’m doing action stories, so that’s the way I like to do it.

When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.

I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.

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.’

I’m totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

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.

If I had my choice, I would be writing by typewriter. I worked on newspapers for 10 years. I typed with the touch system, and unfortunately, you can’t keep typewriters going today. You have to take the ribbons back to be re-inked. You have to – it’s a horrible search to try to find missing parts. So I went to the computer.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

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.

Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.

I still use a typewriter from time to time, but because I can’t type as well as I used to, I really don’t use one very much.

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.

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.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I remember the early days when every month I had to decide whether I should continue to lease a typewriter or if I could finally afford to buy it. Yes, that $12 a month really made a difference in our budget.

Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.

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.

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.

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn’t write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

As the 19th century teetered into the 20th, the clank of typewriter keys went from solo to symphony. They were the weapon of choice for professional writers, the business elite, people with things to say and the need to say them quickly.

I think the computer is a hindrance to good writing because it is so tempting to leave what you’ve written. If you use a typewriter, you must retype if you make a mistake, and thus, you must re-examine every word.

I think I’m from the 18th century, not even the 19th. I don’t even use a typewriter. I prefer longhand, and that’s how I submit my manuscripts to my publishers.

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?’

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.

A typewriter forces you to keep going, to march forward.

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.