Fountain Pen Quotes & Sayings

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind. — Ali Shaw

I've had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two. — Chila Woychik

Also, please charge my fountain pen and bring it with you. — Jonathan L. Howard

The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me. — Hugh MacLeod

What I didn't realize was how many doors the act of writing unlocks, as if my Dad's old fountain pen wasn't really a pen at all, but some strange variety of skeleton key. — Stephen King

As long as I live I'll never forget the time he had a bank president pinched, or rather I did, on no evidence whatever except that the fountain pen on his desk was dry. I was never so relieved in my life as when the guy shot himself an hour later. — Rex Stout

You can borrow my Blackbird, if you like,' said Ben. This was his new fountain pen, which troubled him. It was guaranteed not to leak but writers and schoolchildren knew better. Ben wished to be relieved of the responsibility of the Blackbird, without losing his own dignity. — Penelope Fitzgerald

Even a best fountain-pen cannot make a writer be a fount of eloquence, but fountains teach to sob with ecstasy. — Lara Biyuts

I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India. — Damon Galgut

The musings are the same I believe the fire to create burns so heavily that I am never far from a guitar or a fountain pen. — Shelby Lynne

At first it had slashed up the little silk pockets of her purse. Then she found part of an old thermometer container that slipped over the head of the scalpel, capping it like a fountain pen. It was this cap she removed when the soldier moved into the seat beside her and stretched his arm along the armrest they were (absurdly) meant to share. — John Irving

First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don't get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95 ... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper. — Natalie Goldberg

I've always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil - especially for corrections. — Paul Auster

Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain. — Fennel Hudson

One understands then why woman has no sexual parts, properly speaking. It is because she is herself a sexual part - a sexual part of man, to cumbersome for him to carry around permanently and therefore deposited outside himself for most of the time and taken up when needed. Moreover the quality that distinguishes man from animals is this very power of equipping himself at any moment with an instrument, tool or arm that he needs, but that he can get rid of straight away, whereas the lobster has to drag his two pincers about with him everywhere. And just as mans hand is a sort of grappling hook that enables him to grasp a hammer, sword or fountain pen according to his needs, so his sex is the sort of grappling hook of the sexual parts rather than the sexual part itslef. — Michel Tournier

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

I used to write exclusively with one particular Montblanc fountain pen, although lately I have had to use a roller-tip fountain pen, because I find it harder and harder to control the fine muscles of my right hand during prolonged periods of work. I buy boxes of Deluxe Uni-ball pens, use them until they start to drag, and then change. — Mark Helprin

My pen is an artery, my heart is a fountain — Jay Electronica

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second. — Colm Toibin

He picked up the fountain pen and clicked the top on and off a few times while he listened. — Hugh Laurie

Your basic-type jailhouse tatt is homemade with sewing needles from the jailhouse canteen and some blue ink from the cartridge of a fountain pen promoted from the breast pocket of an unaltert public defender, is why the jailhouse genre is always the same night-sky blue. The needle is dipped in the ink and jabbed as deep into the tattooee as it can be jabbed without making him recoil and fucking up your aim. Just a plain ultraminimal blue square like Gately's got on his right wrist takes half a day and hundreds of individual jabs. How come the lines are never quite straight and the color's never quite all the way solid is it's impossible to get all the individualized punctures down to the same uniform deepness in the, like, twitching flesh. This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done by sadistic children on rainy afternoons. — David Foster Wallace

Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one's existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell. — Josef Pieper

I pass to the Stationery Department. I buy several fountain and stylographic pens - it being my experience that, though a fountain pen in England behaves in an exemplary manner, the moment it is let loose in desert surroundings, it perceives that it is at liberty to go on strike and behaves accordingly, either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper. I also buy a modest two pencils. Pencils are, fortunately, not temperamental, and though given to a knack of quiet disappearance, I have always a resource at hand. After all, what is the use of an architect if not to borrow pencils from. — Agatha Christie Mallowan

In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I'd type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a professional to type a final draft, but I felt I was missing things I would have changed if I had done it myself. In the mid-eighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems a gross mechanical obstruction. I like the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer's memory - like an unspoken thought. I like the way sentences or passages can be endlessly reworked, and the way this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself. Until, of course, it sulks and crashes. — Ian McEwan

Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or fountain pen. — George Orwell

To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about. — Edward Abbey

Vintage fountain pens have provenance that makes a traditionalist go weak at the knuckles. — Fennel Hudson

I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft. — John Dufresne

I'm left with one consolation, small though it may be: my fountain pen was cremated, just as I would like to be some day. — Anne Frank

I am a highly disciplined person. I get up at seven every morning and, still in my pajamas, sit down at my desk where my checkered ring binders and my fountain pen are ready for use. I try to write two pages every day. — Orhan Pamuk

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

When Reg died and we first looked into getting a new dog, I was adamant we should pick up a mongrel from an animal-rescue shelter. It's not only that they're usually healthier and have better temperaments, they also fit with my world view - I prefer a ballpoint to a fountain pen, a barber to a hair stylist, and camping over glamping. — Mark Barrowcliffe

None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try. — Mark Twain

The material came bubbling up inside like a geyser or an oil gusher. It streamed up of its own accord, down my arm and out of my fountain pen in a torrent of six thousand words a day. — C.S. Forester

I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room. — Colm Toibin

Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and staid, respectable Washington Square. Trinity Church. Mrs. Astor's famous ballroom, the Four Hundred, snobby Ward McAllister, that traitor Edith Wharton, Delmonico's. Zany Zelda and Scott in the Plaza fountain, the Algonquin Round Table, Dottie Parker and her razor tongue and pen, the Follies. Cholly Knickerbocker, 21, Lucky Strike dances at the Stork, El Morocco. The incomparable Hildegarde playing the Persian Room at the Plaza, Cary Grant kneeling at her feet in awe. Fifth Avenue: Henri Bendel, Bergdorf's, Tiffany's. — Melanie Benjamin

There was one 'crime' during the whole time I was at school, when a fountain pen went missing. Stealing just didn't happen. I was taught not to shoplift, not to steal, not to behave badly. We weren't even allowed to drop litter. — Joanna Lumley

One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb. ("Novelty") — John Crowley

Gaiman wrote the first draft in fountain pen, in several five-hundred-page, leather-bound sketchbooks that he purchased in a close-out sale. "I really wanted a second draft," says the author. "It's my experience with computers that they do not give you a second draft. Computers give you an ongoing, ever-improving first draft. — Hank Wagner

Some men rob you with a six-gun
others rob you with a fountain pen. — Woody Guthrie

There's something special about writing by hand, writing with a fountain pen, and there's something special about writing into a book, to take a blank book and turn it into an actual book. — Joe Haldeman

I write on a computer, but I've run the complete gambit. When I was very young, I wrote with a ballpoint pen in school notebooks. Then I got pretentious and started writing with a dip pen on parchment (I wrote at least a novel-length poem that way). Moved on to a fountain pen. Then a typewriter, then an electric self-correct. Then someone gave me a word processor and I was amazed at being able to fit ten pages on one of those floppy discs. — Charles De Lint

If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these objects, according to the logic of jealously, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose them, or for them to be damaged, means castration. — Jean Baudrillard

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

It is difficult to describe in short the enthusiasm and devotion provoked by and given to my research. We lived almost in poverty. I used pencils, two for a nickel, and could not buy a fountain pen, when I lost mine. — Immanuel Velikovsky

I write everything with fountain pens. I don't know why. I've done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I've never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points. — Tony Kushner

Now as through this world I ramble, I see lots of funny men, Some rob you with a six gun, And some with a fountain pen. — Woody Guthrie

The owner of the Agut d'Avignon had the air of a 1920s dandy who had ruined himself with one mad night of gambling at baccarat and had only been saved by this restaurant, which he seemed to cherish as if it were his wife or a good fountain pen. — Manuel Vazquez Montalban

The solicitor he selected, a Mr Makepeace, had demanded five thousand pounds up front, even before he took the top off his fountain pen, and then another five once he'd briefed Alex Redmayne, the barrister who would represent him in Court. Danny couldn't understand why he needed two lawyers to do the same job. — Jeffrey Archer

A pen transmits the voice of the soul. — Fennel Hudson

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. — David Nicholls

A tour was being planned so we could conquer America, just like The Beatles had. All we had to do was sign on that little piece of paper you see on Mr. B.S.'s desk. We signed it in blue ink from a fountain pen - but had we known whom we were dealing with we would have pricked ourselves and used blood. — Diane Rinella

All the friends in the world are in the fountain of a pen. — Michelle Franklin