We are often miserable at our desk or typewriters, but not happy away from them.
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.
I publish six books a year now, which is very exciting. But it keeps me into my typewriter at all times! Now that my children have grown up, I'm with my typewriter 20 hours a day.
Sometimes language gets in the way of the story's feelings. The reader finds himself experiencing the language of the story rather than the story. The words sit there on the page like coins, with their own opacity, as though they're there for their own sake. "A man goes into a phone booth, stirring coins in his palm. " "Stirring" is such an obviously selected word. You can feel the writer looking for the word as he sat at the typewriter.
I am aware that a computer can’t create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.
After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.
I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter.
I'm all for typewriters, with instant carbon copies, and seeing films in cinemas.
There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings -and all the people sleeping in the slums.
Here is a pen and here is a pencil, here's a typewriter, here's a stencil, here's a list of today's appointments, and all the flies in all the ointments, the daily woes that a man endures -- take them, George, they're yours!
The worst kind of censorship is the kind that takes place in your own mind before you sit down to a typewriter.
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.
For decades I'd flit from drawing table to typewriter to guitar with no sense of strain or contradiction. They all exercised the same psychic muscle (the Imagination), and working in one medium refreshed my appetite for the others.
When I write, I use an Underwood #5 made in 1920. Someone gave me an electric typewriter, but there's no use pretending you can use machinery that thinks faster than you do. An electric typewriter is ready to go before I have anything to say.
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.
First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
The best kind of writing, and the biggest thrill in writing, is to suddenly read a line from your typewriter that you didnt know was in you.
I love to photograph the tools of one's trade: Duncan Grant's paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.
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.
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?