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.
I write on the typewriter. I like it because I like the feeling of making something with my hands. I like pressing the key and a letter comes up and is printed on a piece of paper. I can understand that.
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
A typical wine writer was once described as someone with a typewriter who was looking for his name in print, a free lunch, and a way to write off his wine cellar. It's a dated view. Wine writers now use computers.
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?
I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry.
The more I hear of ban-the-gun legislation forming in Washington, and the more I hear it advocated from the editorial pulpit of the New York Times, the more I want my own. 45 holstered within easy reach of this typewriter.
When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.
I am amazed; until the day I die I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.
Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about.
I can write faster on a typewriter than you can on a computer. I do 120 words a minute, and you can't do that on a computer.
I like the sound a typewriter makes.
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!
Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.
I never had a typewriter. I never had any machines.
You will never work through writer's block if you walk away from your typewriter. That will only make it easier to walk away the next time.
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
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.
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.