95 Quotes About Typewriters

At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.

To increase the chances of a writer trying to kill themselves, cut off their hands.

Buford, my beloved vintage 1930’s Underwood Universal Champion Portable typewriter. You are both my writing partner and my best friend. This journey you and I have been on has been fun. Although in 2016 you gave me carpal tunnel. In both hands. Didn’t think I knew it was you, did you? You sneaky sombitch.

A lot of novelists start late—Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

The typewriter is indeed my passport into a world otherwise barred to me and my kind.

Found in trees. Sometimes also in old silent movie theaters, seaside zoos, magic shops, hat shops, time-travel shops, topiary gardents, cowboy boots, castle turrets, comet museums, dog pounds, mermaid ponds, dragon lairs, library stacks (the ones in the back), piles of leaves, piles of pancakes, the belly of a fiddle, the bell of a flower, or in the company of wild herds of typewriters. But mostly in trees.

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, meters of ink ribbon, and pints of Tippex. Poor sods.

i heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.