Ernest Hemingway
Novelist
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
Typewriters quotes
Typewriters
194 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Pauli Murray
Civil Rights Lawyer and Activist
"One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement."
Red Smith
Sportswriter
"Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop."
Pablo Neruda
Poet, Diplomat
"The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again."
Douglas Adams
Writer, Humorist
"A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside typewriters — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Typewriters quotes (page 1 of 10)
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"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."
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"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."
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"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.'"
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"On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter."
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"I had an old typewriter and a big idea."
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"When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it...So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer."
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"I used to go round to Aunt Mimi's house and John would be at the typewriter, which was fairly unusual in Liverpool. None of my mates even knew what a typewriter was. Well they knew what it was but they didn't hae one. Nobody had one."
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"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."
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"People die from typewriters falling on their heads."
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"I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in."
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"My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this."
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"At the typewriter you find out who you are."
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"A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Bless all useful objects, the spoons made of bone, the mattress I cook my dreams upon, the typewriter that is my church with an altar of keys always waiting."
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"I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success."
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"What should I do?" "Throw up in your typewriter every morning." "Yeah." "Clean up every noon."
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"When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions."
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"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."
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