Top 311 Typewriter Quotes & Sayings

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

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.

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.

When I sit down at the typewriter, I write. Someone once asked me if I had a fixed routine before I start, like setting up exercises, sharpening pencils, or having a drink of orange juice. I said, "No, the only thing I do before I start writing is to make sure that I'm close enough to the typewriter to reach the keys."

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.

Do some living and get yourself a typewriter.

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.

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

I am aware that a computer can’t create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.

I had an old typewriter and a big idea.

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 am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

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

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

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

Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.

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

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.

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

I think I would die if I couldn't get to the typewriter every day. I really need that.

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.

I don't like to see mistakes on the typewriter. I like a perfect script. On the typewriter I will sometimes leave a phrase that is not right, not what I want, simply because to change it would be a bit messy.

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.

I think I sit down to the typewriter when it's time to sit down to the typewriter. That isn't to suggest that when I do finally sit down at the typewriter, and write out my plays with a speed that seems to horrify all my detractors and half of my well-wishers, that there's no work involved. It is hard work, and one is doing all the work oneself.

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

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.

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.

Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.

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.

I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.

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

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

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

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

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

I publish six books a year now, which is very exciting. But it keeps me into my typewriter at all times! Now that my children have grown up, I'm with my typewriter 20 hours a day.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

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

My Panasonic typewriter can make graphs. It types in four different colors.

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.

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

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

One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.

You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.

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

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.

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.

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

One thing I'd do was put a great writer's book beside the typewriter and... type out a beautiful and moving paragraph... and see those sentences rising up... and... think, 'Someday maybe I can write like that....' It was like a dream of possibilities for my own self. And maybe I began to know that there was no other way for the sentence... to... arouse the same feeling. The someone writing whose words were rising from the typewriter became like a mentor for me.... You shouldn't do it more than a few times because you must get on with your own work.

The secret of successful writing lies in striking the right keys on the typewriter.