Mr Typewriter Quotes & Sayings

I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby. — Augusten Burroughs

Any man who undertakes to write a play is either a damned fool or a hero, I don't know which. When you write a book, you pull it out of the typewriter and that's that. When you write a play you've got to go on with the producer and the director and the actors and the rehearsals and the ... — Rex Stout

if this typewriter cant do it fuck it — Tom Robbins

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

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

There is nothing that I, personally, can do, except be there. At my family's suggestion I begin taking my little six-pound electronic typewriter with me so that I can write while Hugh is napping. This helps. For, like most of us, I feel frustrated when a situation arises where I am totally helpless, where there is nothing I can do to make anything better. I can, I hope, help Hugh a little by my presence, by the touch of my hand. But there is nothing specifically for me to do. And I think of a friend who has a coffee mug with the inscription: DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING. STAND THERE. — Madeleine L'Engle

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

The poet's life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We're hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both. — Eileen Myles

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine. — Edward Abbey

What should I do?" "Throw up in your typewriter every morning." "Yeah." "Clean up every noon. — Ray Bradbury

Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting. — Tom Stoppard

I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. — J.K. Rowling

It's just interesting to me that the physical enactment of that mind moving has gradually changed for you in the last few years. It made me wonder if the change was deliberate in any sense, or procedural, like when A.R. Ammons stuck an adding machine roll into his typewriter to squeeze his verses into shorter lines. — Matthew Zapruder

This was the kind of moral dilemma Pauline often got her into. Mr. Someone-or-Other, Pauline had mouthed. Adele at lunch with him, crying. But Mr. Who? She turned to her typewriter, Pauline's eyes still on her. She would like to ask "Who?" - but to do so, in that same mouthing whisper Pauline had used, would be to enter too fully into Pauline's tale, Pauline's bitter triumph, and, in some way, into Pauline's unhappy life. But Mr. Who? — Alice McDermott

If you have walked into a museum recently - whether you did so to attend an art exhibition or to escape from the police - you may have noticed a type of painting known as a triptych. A triptych has three panels, with something different painted on each of the panels. For instance, my friend Professor Reed made a triptych for me, and he painted fire on one panel, a typewriter on another, and the face of a beautiful, intelligent woman on the third. The triptych is entitled What Happened to Beatrice and I cannot look upon it without weeping.
I am a writer, and not a painter, but if I were to try and paint a triptych entitled The Baudelaire Orphans' Miserable Experiences at Prufrock Prep, I would paint Mr. Remora on one panel, Mrs. Brass on another, and a box of staples on the third, and the results would make me so sad that between the Beatrice triptych and the Baudelaire triptych I would scarcely stop weeping all da — Lemony Snicket

I looked inside my typewriter. There's a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants. — Helen Oyeyemi

I like the idea of being a novelist. I picture myself on the coast, the wind in my hair, horses galloping around me as I sit at my typewriter in the middle of a field ... — Sara Cox

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

The typewriter is neat and compact and sturdy and blue, just the right machine to pound out a missive of love. When you strike the keys it's a sound that hasn't been heard in the qorld world for thirty years (we are so far away from a time when typewriters won world wars). When you strike the keys they make a sound like a pistol shot, a sound so definite and sure you feel like a genius, or an orayor orator, or a beat poet. When you strike the keys you just want to keep on fucking writing. You have to wrestle with the thing, like I am doing now, steer it like an old manual car, keep the words together and right and on the page, but the blood and muscle of a typewriter, it is a beautiful thing. — Yvette Walker

I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness ... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text. — Charles Krauthammer

There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act. — Tom Robbins

When at the typewriter I am no longer where I site but am away across the mountains, in ancient cities or on the Great Plains among the buffalo. Often I think of what pitiful fools are those who use mind-altering drugs to seek feelings they do not have, each drug taking a little more from what they have of mind, leaving them a little less. Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing, and no drugs are needed. — Louis L'Amour

When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts. — Philip Roth

I will now claim - until dispossesed - that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature ... The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects- devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells ... He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered. — Mark Twain

He struck his temples with his fists and screamed: 'Haven't you ever seen a goddam DC converter? You can get them at Radio Shack for three bucks! Are you seriously trying to tell me you couldn't have made a simple DC converter when you can make your tractor fly and your typewriter run on telepathy? Are you?
'Nobody thought of it!' she screamed suddenly. — Stephen King

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call. — A.K. Kuykendall

So many people spend years (and money) studying to be doctors, lawyers, actors, dancers, business executives and scientists - when you're an author, you can be any of these things, and you don't need a degree or certificate; all you need is an imagination, a dream and an open mind. — Rebecca McNutt

Defunct, adj.
You brought home a typewriter for me. — David Levithan

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

One morning I remember pulling out a small card and threading it through my typewriter. Among the words that I typed [ ... ] were these: The simple secret is this: put your trust in the Lord, do your best, then leave the rest to Him. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Some people write by day, others by night. Some people need silence, others turn on the radio. Some write by hand, some by typewriter or word processor, some by talking into a tape recorder. Some people write their first draft in one long burst and the revise; others can't write the second paragraph until they have fiddled endlessly with the first.

But all of them are vulnerable and all of them are tense. — William Zinsser

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

Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter. — Billy Collins

Susan Griffin describes it as a time when "there is no intrinsic authority to my words." "I ... clean off my desk. I make telephone calls. I know I am avoiding the typewriter. I know that in my mind, where there might be words, there is simply a blankness. I may try to write and then my words bore me." But when the time is right, the waiting will have been worth it. "Because each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record." Excerpt from "Thoughts on Writing: A Diary," in The Writer on her Work. — Judith Barrington

Take a woman talking,
purging herself with rhymes,
drumming words out like a typewriter,
planting words in you like grass seed.
You'll move off. — Anne Sexton

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