Tape Recorder Quotes & Sayings
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Top Tape Recorder Quotes

I'll have to have a room of my own. Nobody could sleep with Dick. He wakes up during the night, switches on the lights, speaks into his tape recorder. — Pat Nixon

In the 80s, if you wanted to make electronic music, it was a much tougher and more expensive process. For many people it would involve either spending loads of money on gear or else cutting demos in a proper studio. But I had this Casio keyboard and tape recorder and used to do stuff in my bedroom - I'd listen to Mantronix and all that. That was what I had so that's what I used. — Ekoplekz

The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers. — Alicia Ostriker

I first started doing some somewhat technology-based shows in the '80s. If you wanted to get real technical about it, back in the '70s I used to open up with Utopia with just me on the stage with a four-track tape recorder. So, technically, I've been using the help of various devices pretty much throughout my career. — Todd Rundgren

I think it's always hard for children to talk about abuse because it is only memory. I didn't carry around a tape recorder ... I didn't chisel anything in stone ... Anybody can look and say, 'Well how do you know for sure?' And that's one of the most painful things about it. You don't. — Anne Heche

He wasn't a man, but a tape recorder, repeating catch phrases and old slogans without any thought to the concepts behind them, a dog stuck in the training of his youth and faithfully executing his tasks long after his master had moved on. — Harvey Pekar

To me, one of the greatest triumphs in doing a book is to tell the story as simply as possible. My aim is to imply rather than to overstate. Whenever the reader participates with his own interpretation, I feel that the book is much more successful. I write with the premise that less is more. Writing is not difficult to me. I read into a tape recorder, constantly dropping a word here and there from my manuscript until I get a minimum amount of words to say exactly what I want to say. Each time I drop a word or two, it brings me a sense of victory! — Ezra Jack Keats

I'm called an oral historian, which is something of a joke. Oral history was here long before the pen, long before Gutenberg and the printing press. The difference is I have a tape recorder in my hand. — Studs Terkel

I started performing at two or three on a tape recorder, one of those little flat recorders where you just push play and record. — Erykah Badu

Ah, hi. It's Carter. I wonder if you might want to go out to dinner, or maybe the movies. Maybe you like plays better than movies. I should've looked up what might be available before I called. I didn't think of it. Or we could just have coffee again if you want to do that. Or ... I'm not articulate on these things. I can't use a tape recorder either. And why would you care? If you're at all interested in any of the above, please feel free to call me. Thanks. Um. Good-bye."
"Damn you, Carter Maguire, for your insanely cute quotient. You should be annoying. Why aren't I annoyed? Oh God, I'm going to call you back. I know I'm going to call you back. I'm in such trouble. — Nora Roberts

Gods and demons, being creatures outside of time, don't move in it like bubbles in the stream. Everything happens at the same time for them. This should mean that they know everything that is going to happen because, in a sense, it already has. The reason they don't is that reality is a big place with a lot of interesting things going on, and keeping track of all of them is like trying to use a very big video recorder with no freeze button or tape counter. It's usually easier just to wait and see. — Anonymous

No medicine man these days can afford to be without a portable tape recorder. Without the aid of this modern device, which may be easily concealed in the undergrowth of the jungle, the old tribal authority will rapidly become undermined by the mounting influenece of modern skepticism. — Muriel Spark

I'd been on everybody else's show and there was always a preinterview. Somebody would come with a tape recorder and you'd talk for three or four hours, and they'd take it back and it would be transcribed, and it would be given to the writers, those many writers you see on all those shows, Larry King, Letterman, Leno, etc. And then they choose the answers that will be most evocative on their show. — James Lipton

MILLIE STOOD AND with no warning, lifted the tape recorder above her head and threw it to the ground as if she couldn't bear to hear another word. The back of the tape recorder sprang off when it hit the ground, and the fat D batteries rolled out like wounded soldiers, their tank disabled, their weapons depleted — Amy Harmon

When the audience first sees Cooper talking into his tape recorder at the beginning of 'Twin Peaks,' I think that's the greatest introduction to a character I've seen in my career. It tells you everything about the guy right there in a few minutes as well as bringing up a whole load of questions. — Kyle MacLachlan

Everything I'm doing musically is for its own sake. I'm recording at my house, trying really hard to write songs with a four-track tape recorder. — Bucky Pope

I was getting Monkees Monthly and there was a competition to draw a Monkee. I did a caricature of Micky Dolenz and won 10 pounds-a fantastic sum of money for me then. I bought a secondhand tape recorder, which further launched me. They've been very responsible for me getting started. — Andy Partridge

I had no experience with broadcasting basketball games, so I took a tape recorder and went to a playground where there was a summer league, and I stood up in the top of the stands and I called the game. — Ed Bradley

And we talk it out. Lately, I've had Roy Thomas come in, and he sits and makes notes while we discuss it. Then he types them up, which gives us a written synopsis. Originally - I have a little tape recorder - I had tried taping it, but then I found no one on staff has time to listen to the tape again later. But this way he makes notes, types it quickly, I get a carbon, the artist gets a carbon ... so we don't have to worry that we'll forget what we've said. — Stan Lee

I used to do little sketches into my cassette tape recorder when I was a little boy. I would just turn it on and just start doing voices and characters. I just loved it. — Harland Williams

You could fall in love with me, you can talk to my shrink, you can hide a tape recorder in my bedroom, see what I talk about from wherever I am when I sleep. You want to do that? You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Trystero possibility the way they did, why the assassins came on, why the black costumes. You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth. — Thomas Pynchon

When I made my first film, I think the thing was probably helped me the most was that it was such an unusual thing to do in the early 50s for someone who actually go and make a film. People thought it was impossible. It really is terribly easy. All anybody needs is a camera, a tape recorder, and some imagination. — Stanley Kubrick

The first six years of a child's life, it is like a tape recorder is on. Everything it sees, smells, touches, experiences in any way, whatever it hears, is being downloaded into the brain before the consciousness of the child is even made apparent. — Bruce Lipton

I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose - that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster. — Dave Eggers

After years of begging, I got my parents to get me a little Craig tape recorder, a reel to reel. Then I started recording voices, or recording Jonathan Winters off television and stuff like that. — Dana Carvey

We talked about Zardari, but he spoke carefully and said little of interest, constantly glancing at my tape recorder like it was radioactive. Eventually, he nodded toward it. "Can you turn that off?" he asked. "Sure," I said, figuring he wanted to tell me something off the record. "So. Do you have a friend, Kim?" Sharif asked. I was unsure what he meant. "I have a lot of friends," I replied. "No. Do you have a friend?" I figured it out. "You mean a boyfriend?" "Yes." I looked at Sharif. I had two options - lie, or tell the truth. And because I wanted to see where this line of questioning was going, I told the truth. — Kim Barker

Kilgore here will keep the record straight."
"Kilgore?"
"The tape recorder. I name things. If you name things, then you treat them better." Fiona motioned with her chin to a poster tacked to the opposite wall. "Does she have a name?"
"She" was a bikini-clad model spraying a Lamborghini with a garden hose and, no, she didn't - at least, not one I knew. I lowered my eyes.
"We'll call her Prudence, then," Fiona said. "Now whenever you wake up, you can say, 'Good morning, Prudence, how's tricks? Still in the car washing game, I see.'"
"'How's tricks'?"
"'How's things,'" Fiona explained. "Slang from the good ol' days. I learned it from a kid in a newsie cap."
"A newsie cap?"
"We're getting ahead of ourselves. — Aaron Starmer

Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth. — Joshua Foer

Neuroscientist David Comings drew out the larger implications of such hallucinations for the relationship between our rational and spiritual brains:
The psychedelic drugs like DMT often produce a sensation of "contact," of being in the presence of and interaction with a non-human being. Highly intelligent and sophisticated test subjects who knew these feelings were drug-induced nevertheless insisted the contact had really happened. The temporal lobe-limbic system's emotional tape recorder sometimes cannot distinguish between externally generated real events and internally generated non-real experience thus providing a system in which the rational brain and the spiritual brain are not necessarily in conflict. — Michael Shermer

Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder. It's a creative process. — Susumu Tonegawa

The situation got worse when they came back to her apartment after and someone put on music. An advert interrupted during a moment when I was the person nearest the laptop, and so somebody said to me - quite threateningly, I felt - Put something else on. Obviously I forgot every song I have ever heard in my entire life. In one swift tug, like the tablecloth trick where everything is supposed to remain on the table gone wrong, every name of every artist disappeared too. The only keywords I could think of were the ones on a toy keyboard-and-tape-recorder combo I'd been given as a child, and I hadn't known their meaning even then. Bossa nova, for example.
I said I couldn't think of anything, any music, except silence, and retreated to the corner of the room, pretending to busy myself by scouring the bookcase there, which held little gatherings of figurines as well as Mizuko's many books. — Olivia Sudjic

I have a tape recorder, and I just sing into it. I like to write that way. Sometimes I'll just get melodic ideas, and then I'll go home and sit down and add the lyrics. Or sometimes I'll get a lyric idea that I love. Usually it's pretty combined. Usually I get some kind of a lyrical concept and a melody and work with that. — Melora Hardin

It's such a relief for me to sit in front of a tape recorder and not be using it to learn my lines. — Peter O'Toole

I mean, I haven't been around very long. I can't expect everyone to have seen 'The House Bunny'. Oh God. I am having such waves of internal embarrassment, which now I'm admitting on a tape recorder. This is so one of the things I should keep in my head. — Emma Stone

I never drove a car. I'm hopeless that way. I press the wrong buttons on the tape recorder. But if the person I'm interviewing helps me out, that person feels needed. People need to feel needed. — Studs Terkel

I wanted to be a broadcaster, sportscaster, or gameshow host from a very early age. I did my first broadcasting when I was 10 or 11 - into a tape recorder for my brother's football game, and for local events. A local radio station was experimenting with high school disc jockeys for rock and roll shifts - I applied - and got the job. — Ralph Strangis

As a 13, - 14-year-old kid, I'd sit on my bed with a tape recorder and a newspaper. I would do my own newscast. I would practice my diction. — Lester Holt

Death is not complete annihilation. It is a pause. It is like pressing the pause button on a tape recorder. — Mata Amritanandamayi

Well, if you're not a man in glasses standing in front of me with a tape recorder going like this, I can't see anything. But if you are, then I see perfectly well. — Colm Feore

Every single morning, I have a person sitting right there next to me in prayer with a tape recorder - and a song comes up every day. — Andrae Crouch

If the front door is opened," Barris said, "during our absence, my cassette tape recorder starts recording. It's under the couch. It has a two-hour tape. I placed three omnidirectional Sony mikes at three different--" "You should have told me," Arctor said. "What if they come in through the windows?" Luckman said. "Or the back door?" "To increase the chances of their making their entry via the front door," Barris continued, "rather than in other less usual ways, I providentially left the front door unlocked." After a pause, Luckman began to snigger. "Suppose they don't know it's unlocked?" Arctor said. "I put a note on it," Barris said. — Philip K. Dick

My mom played the recorder. But not having electricity, we had minimal exposure to music. As I got a little older, we had Walkmans and things that were battery-powered, but it would have been nice to be growing up in the iPod era. A tape only has six songs on a side. — Bode Miller

Life is marvelous now because I have a tape recorder. — Olga Korbut

A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes. — Pete Townshend

I think if you write humor, then people don't - you know - they don't give you that much credit. They tend to think you just dictate your stories into a tape recorder. And I'm not necessarily insulted by that, because I think that just means that it looks easy. — David Sedaris

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 would be content if I had nothing but a tape-recorder. I could still write songs and record them. — Barry Gibb

Right' i said. 'but first, we need the car. and after that, the cocaine. and then the tape recorder, for special music, and some acapulco shirts. — Hunter S. Thompson

I bought a tape recorder and some stuff and went to Europe for three months when I was 18. The puppeteering was only there as a hobby. I wanted to be a journalist. When I was 19, and after I had spent about a year in college, Jim Henson asked me to come out and try puppeteering for awhile. — Frank Oz

This kiss is zeroes and ones jumbled
and tossed into a pneumatic system,
unscrambled at the end and scrawled
onto a tape recorder slowly rolling
at the side of your bed,
then slapping back, reverbed
off the ringer, a tinny phantom
of the smooch like a smack on
an aluminum can, up the same
veins through the belly of the same satellite
and softly to the side of my head; — Mike Doughty

I usually dream of melodies. When I wake up I have them in my head. I usually come up with things in the middle of the night because that's when my mind is the quietest. I always have my tape recorder, pen and pad by my bed just in case. — Leona Lewis

Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I'd try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, 'This is the end.' I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week. — Rupert Murdoch

He [Andy warhol] went out every evening to five or six parties with a tape recorder in one pocket and a camera with extra film and batteries in the other pocket, constantly recording and photographing everyone he came across. — Bob Colacello

No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us. — Adrienne Rich

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder. — William S. Burroughs

I was 4 and dictating stories into a tape recorder, and my mom typed them up. — Shonda Rhimes

Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down. — Maria Mazziotti Gillan

I wanted to get a tape recorder, but I got a parrot instead. I think I did that joke backwards. — Mitch Hedberg

Most of our stuff was trial and error. You live with a tape recorder, you turn it on, you play the song and you listen to it. — Levon Helm

Dammit that yodel of triumph of yours was the most beautiful thing I ever heard in my life. I wish I'd a had a tape recorder to take it down.'
'Those things aren't made to be heard by the people below,' says Japhy dead serious.
'By God you're right, all those sedentary bums sitting around on pillows hearing the cry of the triumphant mountain smasher, they don't deserve it. But when I looked up and saw you running down that mountain I suddenly understood everything. — Jack Kerouac

Imagine if Beethoven had a tape recorder. Then you'd know exactly what he meant. Maybe he meant 'Da da da da' instead of 'Boom boom boom boom!' Who knows? — Eddie Van Halen

Don't let your life be a tape recorder of the misery of the past. You can do nothing about the past. -RVM — R.v.m.

So I use a tape recorder a lot to record ideas. — John Frusciante

Can you stop your memory on a dime, put it in reverse, and spin it in another direction the way you can reverse direction on a tape recorder? We cannot forget on command. So we just have to let the forgetting happen as it will; we shouldn't rush it, and we certainly should not doubt the genuineness of our forgiving if we happen to remember. The really important thing is that we have the power to forgive what we still do remember. — Lewis B. Smedes

Yoko Ono is someone who's music I've discovered more recently. The current cd rereleases of her albums all had bonus tracks recorded just with a tape recorder and I'm really into these at the moment because they have a great intimate feel. — Marcel Dzama

I can never kind of fathom a character's journey beyond the moment when you go to black, any more than when people ask me what Jason Patric did with the tape recorder at the end of 'Narc,' you know what I mean? Even in 'Blood, Guts,' like, what happens down the road with these characters? — Joe Carnahan

In 1968 I ran into Steve Lacy on the street in Rome. I took out my pocket tape recorder and asked him to describe in fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation. He answered: "In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds." His answer lasted exactly fifteen seconds. — Frederic Rzewski

It is just like your tape-recorder. It records, it reproduces - all by itself. You only listen. Similarly, I watch all that happens, including my talking to you. It is not me who talks, the words appear in my mind and then I hear them said. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past. — Walker Percy

I turned off my tape-recorder and just sat looking at him for a moment, this strange time-traveller from the year 1890 or so, who remembered when there were no cars, no electric lights, no airplanes, no state of Arizona. — Stephen King

When I was doing interviews at the FBI, my tape recorder battery died. They gave me a new one, and I said, 'Of course, this is bugged?' — Ronald Kessler

PLAY ME.
My gaze flicked to the hand. The fist was curled around a small tape recorder. I moved the fingers - still warm - and pressed play. A male voice started to speak.
"Do I have your attention?" the voice asked.
I knew that voice. But I couldn't believe I was hearing it.
"Noah's alive," Jude said. — Michelle Hodkin

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder. — Tom Waits

If you're famous and supposedly wise, it's always a good idea to have a tape recorder in the room. Never can tell when you might spew out a line or two worth printing somewhere. — Richard Elman

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place. Certainly, the convention existed well before the age of the tape recorder and the wiretap. Not on the phone, in a spy or mystery story, has always been, in and of itself, sufficient to hold up the resolution of the case for a long, long time. — Renata Adler

I've woken up from dreams and the whole song is there. I'm listening to it in my dreams. I consciously have to wake myself up and get a tape recorder because I hear it like a record. — Lenny Kravitz

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school. — Brian Eno

I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs. — Jean-Paul Sartre

With my recovery programme, I have to do a daily inventory of how my day has been. I am terribly dyslexic and have attention deficit disorder, so I have to carry a tape recorder everywhere I go. — Ozzy Osbourne

In September 2005, I was three things: the media blogger for 'FishbowlNY,' a maniacal Daily Show fan, and the only person to smuggle a tape recorder and camera into a big Magazine Publishers of America event featuring Jon Stewart interviewing five hotshot magazine editors in an unbelievable bloodbath. — Rachel Sklar

I'm here as a radio journalist but am not even sure which part of a tape recorder takes the pictures. — P. J. O'Rourke

I get like a melody that comes up and I try to write it down or record it. Hum it into a tape recorder or write it down on some manuscript paper. It could happen at any time, on the road or off the road, but mostly, you know, at home. — Paul Taylor

I could learn how to press 'Record' on a tape recorder and write for a newspaper or a magazine. — Barry Bonds

When I was a child, life felt so slow because all I wanted to do was get into show business. Each day seemed like a year, but when you get older, years pass like minutes. I wish there was a tape recorder where we could just slow our lives down. — Bruce Forsyth

I was broadcast-struck from an early age; I had saved up for a tape recorder and started making programmes. — Nigel Rees

Structure 19. You worried about structure when you came up with your story! If you did, I'm sorry. You missed some of the most joyous moments in writing. Character and story come first. Before anything. Certainly before all that Act One, Two, and Three crapola. When you're teasing out your story, make lots of notes. Think out loud. Talk to a tape recorder. Make more notes. Fill up oceans of 3x5 cards. Write on yellow legal pads. Write on white legal pads. Scribble on napkins or beer coasters. Write down cool stuff for characters to do that may never find its way into the movie. Make notes and more notes and more notes, but do not trouble yourself with structure. Screw structure. Have fun. Structure is for later. For now, just let your incredibly creative mind run free. Make notes about character and plot and story and funny moments and locations you'd like to visit. Tape record dialogue for your — William M. Akers

When I give a speech at a corporate event, I often ask those in attendance, 'Do you know how to tell if you're doing the job?' As heads start whispering back and forth, I provide these clue: 'If you're up at 3 A.M. every night talking into a tape recorder and writing notes on scraps of paper, have a knot in your stomach and a rash on your skin, are losing sleep and losing touch with your wife and kids, have no appetite or sense of humor, and feel that everything might turn out wrong, then you're probably doing the job.' — Bill Walsh

Eventually we discovered Bleeker Bob's in the West Village on 118 West Third Street. One time I was there I literally tried to rip the first Iron Maiden album out of the hands of a friend of mine. [...] I was having a tug-of-war with this guy over who was gonna buy it. [...] If I hadn't won, I would've gone home and gotten my shitty little tape recorder that you have to use two fingers to push play and record on, and I would've brought that to my friend's house and held it in front of a speaker to tape the record so I'd have something to listen to until I could find another copy. Yeah, it'd sound terrible but so what? We didn't know anything else. When I hear people say, 'I hate MP3s, they sound like shit,' I'm like, 'Fuck you, you hae no idea, you first-world-problem-having motherfucker. — Scott Ian