Top 60 Typewriter Quotes

I remember being out here at the Sunset Marquis, and whoever knocked on the door, I would take that picture that I was writing and I would put that in the typewriter, so when I had the meeting, they would say: ‘Oh, you’re working on it right now?’

When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad’s old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.

My aunt got me interested in journalism – she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, ‘Play like you’re a writer.’

I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.

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.

My mother wrote poetry when I was young – I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter – and my father told me inventive bedtime stories.

I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don’t have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels – I love to write on my laptop!

Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.

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

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.

If you’re a photographer, they give you a camera. If you’re a writer, they give you a typewriter. If you’re an umpire, they give you an unseen object and they call it a strike zone, and nobody seems to agree with you no matter what you call.

Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.

In the future the way that Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed.

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

I can’t imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it’s of no importance.

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

I’ve been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year – almost 20 years ago – I was on an IBM PC. Then, in 1984, I found the Mac, and I never looked back.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

My first typewriter cost me $75. I can’t tell you how many hours it took me to earn that money, or how proud I was of that object. I wrote my first books on it. They will never be published, but that’s all right.

Poetry for me is very easy. It’s like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.

I still use a typewriter from time to time, but because I can’t type as well as I used to, I really don’t use one very much.

I wrote a letter to the CIA on my manual college typewriter. I mailed it to CIA with my resume. I didn’t have an address. So I just put, ‘CIA. Washington, D.C.’

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.

It’s no coincidence that I began writing the day my daughter started school. I knew everything I knew before I began to write, but I was raising two children and didn’t have the time to get to the typewriter.

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

I think there are some writers – like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he’s the type of writer whose voice infects you.

I’d started doing fanzines from the age of nine. I’d been doing as many copies as you can get carbon paper into an upright typewriter, and I’d try to sell them at school.

I wasn’t as used to the new dumb questions, so when men I had once thought of as wise daddies now asked me ‘How do you write?’ I did not try and spill red wine in their suede pants. I would just smile and say, ‘On a typewriter in the mornings when there’s nothing else to do.’

Much as I like owning a Rolls-Royce, I could do without it. What I could not do without is a typewriter, a supply of yellow second sheets and the time to put them to good use.

No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge.

Gibson wrote ‘Neuromancer’ on a typewriter, you know, before the technology he was writing about existed.

When I write a novel, I am God at my own typewriter, and there is nobody in between. But when I write a screenplay, it must be a compromise because there are so many elements which are outside the writer’s province.

I started out when I was 29 – too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I’m trying to do. I’m frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

I have a love/hate relationship with just about all technology in my life. My first typewriter in particular. I had a helluva time putting new ribbon on it.

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

My father was a TV scriptwriter. He would perform his dialogue out loud, while my mum transcribed it at the typewriter. So I grew up thinking that plucking characters out of the air was an extremely normal way to behave.

I understand the self-loathing and the resentment, and the discipline that it takes to sit down in front of a typewriter or computer every single day, whether it’s going well or not going well.

Using a typewriter, at times, feels more like playing piano than jotting down notes, a percussive exercise in expressing thought that is both tortuous and rewarding.

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

In spite of advances in technology and changes in the economy, state government still operates on an obsolete 1970s model. We have a typewriter government in an Internet age.

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

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

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

I was living in a large apartment with no furniture, just a typewriter, and because I had nothing else to do with my time, it made me take my writing seriously.

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

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.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer’s block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter – now, computer – lit up a cigarette.

When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.

I think I’m from the 18th century, not even the 19th. I don’t even use a typewriter. I prefer longhand, and that’s how I submit my manuscripts to my publishers.

I love working on a typewriter – the rhythm, the sound; it’s like playing the piano, which I do, too.

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, ‘Okay, you fall off the horse this time.’

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

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

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

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 pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.