Typewriters Quotes - Page 9

• Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to the desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

  Jeff MacNelly

  Writing, Simple, Blood

  "Fictional character: Prof. Cosmo Fishhawk". "Shoe" by Jeff MacNelly, 1977-2000.

  73 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder - and turn quickly to my typewriter.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Morning, Staring, Turns

  "Church Times" Newspaper, December 30, 1983.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Notebook, Running, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

  Billy Collins

  Novelists, Poet, Banging

  FaceBook post by Billy Collins from May 31, 2013

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• I beg of you, you who could and should be bearing and rearing a family: Wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the cafe. No career approaches in importance that of wife, homemaker, mother -- cooking meals, washing dishes, making beds for one's precious husband and children. Come home, wives, to your husbands. Make home a heaven for them. Come home, wives, to your children, born and unborn. Wrap the motherly cloak about you and, unembarrassed, help in a major role to create the bodies for the immortal souls who anxiously await.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Mother, Husband, Children

  19 Copy quote

• The iPhone is not and never was a phone. It is a pocket-sized computer that obviates the phone. The iPhone is to cell phones what the Mac was to typewriters.

  John Gruber

  Iphone, Phones, Cells

  6 Copy quote

• Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.

  Neil Simon

  Long, Dancing, Laughing

  5 Copy quote

• It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

  Richard Bach

  Writing, Thinking, Keys

  8 Copy quote

• Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there's a big difference between being a writer and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. You've got to want to write, I say to them, not want to be a writer. The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.

  Alex Haley

  Dream, Lonely, Writing

  "Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work". Book by Jack Canfield, Maida Rogerson, Mark Victor Hansen, and Martin Rutte, 1996.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's good to be able to deal with it [anger] somehow other than drinking, fighting, crashing cars, hitting your kid, your wife, your husband, your whatever. Paintbrushes, pens, movie cameras, guitars, microphones, typewriters -- these are good things. Weights. These are positive ways, good ways to deal with anger, frustration, alienation, rage. 'Cause all the other ways do nothing but hurt people.

  Henry Rollins

  Hurt, Husband, Drinking

  20 Copy quote

• A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

  E. B. White

  Writing, Heart, Errors

  7 Copy quote

• If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Education, Numbers, Statistics

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2016). “Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile”, p.1504, Random House

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.

  Lewis Thomas

  Running, Taken, Neurons

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is the same problem I have with digital photography. The potential is always remarkable. But the medium never settles. Each year there is a better camera to buy and new software to download. The user never has time to become comfortable with the tool. Consequently too much of the work is merely about the technology. The HDR and QTVR fads are good examples. Instead of focusing on the subject, users obsess over RAW conversion, Photoshop plug-ins, and on and on. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.

  Alec Soth

  Photography, Technology, Years

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

  Struggle, Writing, Stubborn

  8 Copy quote

• In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.

  Douglas Adams

  Technology, Window, Used

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Mean, Past

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Looks, Still Life With Woodpecker, Tricks

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Still Life with Woodpecker”, p.10, Bantam

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I sit down at the typewriter, I write. Someone once asked me if I had a fixed routine before I start, like setting up exercises, sharpening pencils, or having a drink of orange juice. I said, "No, the only thing I do before I start writing is to make sure that I'm close enough to the typewriter to reach the keys."

  Isaac Asimov

  Writing, Exercise, Orange Juice

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)

  Richard Matheson

  Morning, Office, Trying

  Richard Matheson (2003). “Collected Stories”, Gauntlet Press

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• The reason I was able to give up smoking was because of the computer. You couldn't lean a cigarette on a computer, like you could on a typewriter. So it just made it that much more difficult to smoke. So I quit.

  Robert Stone

  Giving Up, Smoking, Able

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think that's why I've lasted this long because I love everything I make fun of! I make fun of myself first! I mean, I started my career by calling my films "trash" - the local critics used to complain that I beat the critic to the typewriter.

  John Waters

  Fun, Mean, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• Some professional writers write everyday no matter what and perhaps that's the way it should be done, but it's not the way I do it. If I'm not pregnant with words and I'm not in labor with them, I don't even try to bring them forth because they won't be any good anyway. Once I'm ready to deliver, it's like being pregnant. I've got to find a typewriter or a piece of paper. The only words that have ever had any possible value to others seem to have been those words that just had to come out.

  Marianne Williamson

  Writing, Everyday, Trying

  Source: www.douglasgillies.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don't wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.

  Peter Kreeft

  Atheist, Years, Religion

  Peter Kreeft (1988). “Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics”, p.26, Ignatius Press

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was a radioman when I first went into the Navy, so I learned to type by taking Morse code. So I was using the typewriter from day one. My handwriting wasn't any good anyway.

  Robert Stone

  Navy, Firsts, Handwriting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source