Typewriters Quotes - Page 4

• I'm an empress.
  I wear an apron.
  My typewriter writes.
  It didn't break the way it warned.
  Even crazy, I'm as nice
  as a chocolate bar.

  Anne Sexton

  Crazy, Nice, Writing

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.118, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Self Esteem, Deep Breathing, Arrogance

  Harlan Ellison (2014). “Shatterday”, p.199, Open Road Media

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• He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.

  A. E. Hotchner

  Reading, Writing, Sides

  A. E. Hotchner (2009). “Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir”, p.14, Da Capo Press

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• What a story that would make! How many men and women go through the same rivers, menaced by the same sharp clichés, the same jagged dangers that have threatened us! If the idea stands up, I thought, it would be worth uncovering the typewriter! How Richard-years-ago would have wanted to know: What happens when we set off searching for a soulmate who doesn't exist, and find her?

  Richard Bach

  Soulmate, Men, Years

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• To say, "Well, I write when I really get into it" is a bunch of bull. Put the paper in the typewriter, stare at it a long time, get snowblindness if you have to, but write something.

  Erma Bombeck

  Writing, Long, Bulls

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• There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.

  J. B. Priestley

  Lonely, Science, History

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• Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper- at a cost of ...less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.
  'Think of that.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, Thinking, Order

  Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

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• Listen closely. There’s a remote possibility that you might learn something: First, I don’t give a damn if my work is commercial or not…I’m the writer. If what I write is good, then people will read it. That’s why literature exists. An author puts his heart and guts on the page. For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don’t believe in yourself.

  John Fante

  Believe, Writing, Heart

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• take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning

  Charles Bukowski

  Chaos, Sickness, Typing

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• I don't consider writing a quiet, closet act.
  I consider it a real physical act.
  When I'm home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy.
  I move like a monkey.
  I've wet myself, I've come in my pants writing.

  Patti Smith

  Crazy, Real, Moving

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• There are times where I would keep three typewriters on a table, and I'd have three complete thoughts going. With computers, you make folders, files - I don't know about those things. I have sheaves of paper polluted with words and paragraphs. I found it a good tool for me. And it keeps your hands strong for guitar playing.

  Eddie Vedder

  Strong, Guitar, Hands

  Source: www.twofeetthick.com

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• I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.

  Jane Yolen

  Jealous, Artist, Impact

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• Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays- I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.

  James N. Frey

  Block, Real, Book

  James N. Frey (2010). “How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling”, p.168, St. Martin's Press

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• 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

  Encouragement, Thinking, Cities

  Louis L'Amour (2008). “Education of a Wandering Man”, p.166, Bantam

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• I can write faster on a typewriter than you can on a computer. I do 120 words a minute, and you can't do that on a computer.

  Ray Bradbury

  Writing, Computer, Minutes

  Ray Bradbury, Steven L. Aggelis (2004). “Conversations with Ray Bradbury”, p.122, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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

  Daniel Handler

  Circumstances, Virginians

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• A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

  Marvin Minsky

  Trying, Sound, Purpose

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• I am not a new journalist, whatever that is. I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.

  Nora Ephron

  Bangs, Form, Journalist

  Nora Ephron (2011). “Wallflower at the Orgy”, p.12, Bantam

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• My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.

  William Maxwell

  Daughter, Children, Doors

  William Maxwell, Barbara Burkhardt (2012). “Conversations with William Maxwell”, p.45, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.

  Susan Sontag

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: ctheory.net

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• The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!

  Allen Ginsberg

  Voice, Holy

  Allen Ginsberg (2001). “Howl and Other Poems: Pocket Poets Number 4”, p.27, City Lights Publishers

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• I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.

  Roger Zelazny

  Writing, Trying, Four

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• The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a different. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Carona electric typewriter and work hard at ... something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. East sensibly. Stuff like that.

  David Nicholls

  Art, Life Changing, Hard Work

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• I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don't function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I'm even ready to write.

  Wole Soyinka

  Morning, Writing, Gestation Period

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• It had the old double keyboard, an entirely different set of keys for capitals and figures, so that the paper seemed a long way off, and the machine was as big and solid as a battle cruiser. Typing was then a muscular activity. You could ache after it. If you were not familiar with those vast keyboards, your hand wandered over them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have thought of carrying one of those grim structures as you would have thought of travelling with a piano.

  J. B. Priestley

  Children, Piano, Keys

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