Quotes About Writing

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

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 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.

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

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

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

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.

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

There's no rule I want to break or ever wanted to break - I find the conventional life gratifying - as long as I can sit at my typewriter, alone, for half a day.

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

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.

Harper Lee and Truman Capote became friends as next-door neighbors in the late 1920s, when they were about kindergarten age. From the start, they recognized in each other "an apartness," as Capote later expressed it; and both loved reading. When Lee's father gave them an old Underwood typewriter, they began writing original stories together.

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

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

The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.

Although I long to get away from the typewriter, if I think I can produce a better opening or a better closing to a chapter, I'll change and change round again until I'm satisfied.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

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

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.

My Panasonic typewriter can make graphs. It types in four different colors.

You know, my first three or four drafts, you can see, are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter, and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at.

As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.

I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.