Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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 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'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.
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 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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although I long to get away from the typewriter, if I think I can produce a better opening or a better closing to a chapter, I'll change and change round again until I'm satisfied.
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 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.
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.'
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Prior to 1980, people used to dictate to a secretary for preparing written documents and that person would then punch keys on a typewriter. I was inspired to invent a medium for doing this work by engaging just one person.
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.
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.
I type most of my books for the first chapter or two - I use a manual typewriter for the first 50 pages or so - and then I move to the computer. It helps me keep the work lean so I don't end up spending 10 pages describing a leaf.
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!
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.
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've been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year - almost 20 years ago - I was on an IBM PC. Then, in 1984, I found the Mac, and I never looked back.
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.
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.
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?'
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 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.
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.
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.