Typewriters famous quotes

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

#Reading #Writing #Typewriters

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

#Writing #Typewriters #Tables

This is the same problem I have with digital photography. The potential is always remarkable. But the medium never settles. Each year there is a better camera to buy and new software to download. The user never has time to become comfortable with the tool. Consequently too much of the work is merely about the technology. The HDR and QTVR fads are good examples. Instead of focusing on the subject, users obsess over RAW conversion, Photoshop plug-ins, and on and on. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.
-- Alec Soth

#Photography #Technology #Typewriters

For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.
-- Alec Soth

#Technology #Typewriters #Needs

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

#Typewriters #House #Wonder

I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.
-- Alistair Cooke

#Writing #Typewriters #Talking

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Typewriters #Great Writers

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

#Writing #Thinking #Typewriters

There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself.
-- Anne Rice

#Writing #Typewriters #People

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

#Book #Writing #Typewriters

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

#Love Is #Typewriters #Yesterday

A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.
-- Barbara Holland

#Writing #Cat #Typewriters

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

#Typewriters #Trying #Stories

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
-- Billy Collins

#Typewriters #Novelists #Poet

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.
-- Buchi Emecheta

#Children #Writing #Typewriters

I enjoy the process of writing. The torment comes in getting my bottom on the chair and in front of the typewriter.
-- Caryl Rivers

#Writing #Typewriters #Chairs

WHEN YOU LEAVE YOUR TYPEWRITER YOU LEAVE YOUR MACHINE GUN AND THE RATS COME POURING THROUGH.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Writing #Gun #Typewriters

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

#Morning #Writing #Typewriters

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

#Typewriters #Self #Discipline

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

#Typewriters #Years #Space

When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon. It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.
-- David Sedaris

#Writing #Airports #Typewriters

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

#Fun #Artist #Typewriters

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

#Technology #Typewriters #Window

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
-- E. B. White

#Heart #Writing #Typewriters

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Dream #Memories #Typewriters

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

#Wall #Museums #Typewriters

I have a love/hate relationship with just about all technology in my life. My first typewriter in particular. I had a helluva time putting new ribbon on it.
-- Eric Stoltz

#Hate #Technology #Typewriters

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Writing #Bad Ass #Typewriters

I don't do rewrites. I put all the pages in a pile next to the typewriter.
-- Francine Pascal

#Typewriters #Pages #Next

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

#Writing #Wine #Typewriters

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

#Morning #Block #Typewriters

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

#Typewriters #Hands #Two

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

#Struggle #Writing #Typewriters

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

#Eight #Typewriters #Alcohol

When you're all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you have. It often looks like egomania. I assure you it's the bold coverup of the absolutely terrified.
-- Harlan Ellison

#Self Esteem #Breathing #Typewriters

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.
-- Howard Rheingold

#Typewriters #Rooms

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a ***** banshee. There's no avoiding it...So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer.
-- Hunter S. Thompson

#Writing #Typewriters #Doors

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

#Typewriters #Monkeys #Thanks

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

#Sleep #Writing #Typewriters

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
-- J. B. Priestley

#Lonely #Typewriters #History

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

#Writing #Typewriters #Skills

A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.
-- James M. Cain

#Writing #College #Typewriters

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

#Block #Typewriters #Next

I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.
-- Jane Yolen

#Jealous #Artist #Typewriters

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

#Writing #Simple #Typewriters

You have typewriters, presses. And a huge audience. How about raising hell?
-- Jenkin Lloyd Jones

#Writing #Typewriters #Hell

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

#Believe #Typewriters #Self

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
-- Joan Didion

#Typewriters #World #Tiny

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

#New York #Men #Typewriters

For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don't believe in yourself.
-- John Fante

#Believe #Typewriters #Mind

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

#Iphone #Phones #Typewriters

I edit as I go. Especially when I go to commit it to paper. I prefer a typewriter even to a computer. I don't like it. There's no noise on the computer. I like a typewriter because I am such a slow typist. I edit as I am committing it to paper. I like to see the words before me and I go, "Yeah, that's it." They appear before me and they fit. I don't usually take large parts out. If I get stuck early in a song, I take it as a sign that I might be writing the chorus and don't know it. Sometimes,you gotta step back a little bit and take a look at what you're doing.
-- John Prine

#Song #Writing #Typewriters

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

#Writing #Sunset #Typewriters

People die from typewriters falling on their heads.
-- Jonathan Davis

#Falling In Love #Fall #Typewriters

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

#Writing #Typewriters #Thrill

Sometimes language gets in the way of the story's feelings. The reader finds himself experiencing the language of the story rather than the story. The words sit there on the page like coins, with their own opacity, as though they're there for their own sake. "A man goes into a phone booth, stirring coins in his palm." "Stirring" is such an obviously selected word. You can feel the writer looking for the word as he sat at the typewriter.
-- Leonard Michaels

#Men #Phones #Typewriters

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

#Writing #Keys #Typewriters

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

#Typewriters #Trying #Finals

You don’t ask a writer what typewriter he uses.
-- Man Ray

#Typewriters #Use

I am trying to get the hang of this new fangled writing machine, but I am not making a shining success of it. However, this is the first attempt I have ever made & yet I perceive I shall soon & easily acquire a fine facility in its use. ... The machine has several virtues. I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair & work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around. Of course it saves paper.
-- Mark Twain

#Believe #Writing #Typewriters

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Typewriters #Trying #Sound

We are often miserable at our desk or typewriters, but not happy away from them.
-- Mary Roberts Rinehart

#Typewriters #Miserable #Not Happy

I seat myself at the typewriter and hope, and lurk.
-- Mignon G. Eberhart

#Writing #Typewriters

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

#Numbers #Typewriters #Statistics

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

#Notebook #Writing #Typewriters

I'm all for typewriters, with instant carbon copies, and seeing films in cinemas.
-- Olivia de Havilland

#Typewriters #Cinema #Film

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.
-- P. G. Wodehouse

#Writing #Typewriters #Curse

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

#Typewriters #Hands #Worship

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

#Typewriters #Mind #Kind

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

#New York #Gun #Typewriters

One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.
-- Pauli Murray

#Typewriters #Movement #Plus

Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don't wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Atheist #Typewriters #Years

I'm not superstitious in my normal daily life but I get that way about writing, even though I know it's all bullshit. But I began that way and so, that's the way it is. My ritual is I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It's a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook and then fill it up.
-- Quentin Tarantino

#Notebook #Writing #Typewriters

Well, when I was 13, for my bar mitzvah I received my first typewriter. And that was special.
-- R. L. Stine

#Typewriters #Special #Bars

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

#Passion #Typewriters #Worry

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Morning #Writing #Typewriters

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

#Writing #Typewriters #Veins

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.
-- Richard Bach

#Writing #Thinking #Typewriters

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

#Morning #Typewriters #Office

They gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week, and after a week, they only used it as a bathroom.
-- Robin Ince

#Technology #Typewriters #Monkeys

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

#Writing #Thinking #Typewriters

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

#Writing #Typewriters #Odds

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

#Typewriters #Paper #Want

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

#Thinking #Typewriters #Games

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

#Typewriters #Long #Crafts

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

#Falling In Love #Men #Typewriters

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

#Failure #Night #Typewriters

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

#Typewriters

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

#Loneliness #Writing #Typewriters

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

#Writing #Typewriters #Self

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

#Daughter #Children #Typewriters

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

#Typewriters #Empathy #Creative

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

#Morning #Writing #Typewriters

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

#Morning #Writing #Typewriters

I write most of my first drafts on an old manual typewriter, a really old one. It's a big black metal "Woodstock" from about 1920. I try to write everything down at once, in one sitting. The longer stories in this collection are divided up into sections. Each section represents a different sitting, a different idea for the same story.
-- Arthur Bradford

#Writing #Typewriters #Ideas

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

#Mean #Typewriters #Here And There

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

#Fun #Simple #Typewriters

... 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

#Photography #Art #Typewriters

My Panasonic typewriter can make graphs. It types in four different colors.
-- Heather O'Rourke

#Typewriters #Color #Four

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

#Typewriters #Yellow #Use