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41 " The LanyardThe other day I was ricocheting slowlyoff the blue walls of this room,moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,when I found myself in the L section of the dictionarywhere my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.No cookie nibbled by a French novelistcould send one into the past more suddenly—a past where I sat at a workbench at a campby a deep Adirondack lakelearning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.I had never seen anyone use a lanyardor wear one, if that's what you did with them,but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and againuntil I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother.She gave me life and milk from her breasts,and I gave her a lanyard.She nursed me in many a sick room,lifted spoons of medicine to my lips, laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,and then led me out into the airy lightand taught me to walk and swim, and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard.Here are thousands of meals, she said,and here is clothing and a good education.And here is your lanyard, I replied,which I made with a little help from a counselor.Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,strong legs, bones and teeth,and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.And here, I wish to say to her now,is a smaller gift—not the worn truththat you can never repay your mother,but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could bethat this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even. "
― Billy Collins , Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems
42 " Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task -- such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping -- I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something. "
― Isaac Asimov
43 " By living, thinking, even dreaming the story in one continuous process, ideas came faster and faster. Sometimes the typewriter keys would fly so fast that I wondered if my fingers could keep up with them. And at the finish of the story I often had to take a few days off as my fingertips were too sore to begin work on the next book. "
― Walter B. Gibson
44 " If you take one typewriter and build 100, you’ve made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress. "
45 " Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at … something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever... "
― David Nicholls , One Day
46 " In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I'd type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a professional to type a final draft, but I felt I was missing things I would have changed if I had done it myself. In the mid-eighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems a gross mechanical obstruction. I like the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer's memory - like an unspoken thought. I like the way sentences or passages can be endlessly reworked, and the way this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself. Until, of course, it sulks and crashes. "
― Ian McEwan
47 " I’m now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of ‘real’ aggressivity. I’m sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world. "
― Susan Sontag , As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
48 " There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. "
― Stephen King , On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
49 " In the Village IIIWho has removed the typewriter from my desk,so that I am a musician without his pianowith emptiness ahead as clear and grotesqueas another spring? My veins bud, and I am sofull of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.The notes outside are visible; sparrows willline antennae like staves, the way springs were,but the roofs are cold and the great grey riverwhere a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,moves imperceptibly like the accumulatingyears. I have no reason to forgive herfor what I brought on myself. I am past hating,past the longing for Italy where blowing snowabsolves and whitens a kneeling mountain rangeoutside Milan. Through glass, I am waitingfor the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginningof spring, but my hands, my work, feel strangewithout the rusty music of my machine. No wordsfor the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mangeof old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds. "
― Derek Walcott
50 " (I'm not online.) I don’t have a fax. I don’t go in for any of that stuff. The typewriter is as far as I went. "
― Walter Kaylin , He-Men, Bag Men, and Nymphos: Classic Men's Adventure Magazine Stories
51 " I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time. "
― Jane Yolen
52 " Earlier that day, a typewriter bomb had exploded at a black market skin house over on Eel Street, sending words raining through the cardboard walls of the boudoirs and tattooing copies of the Machinist’s ‘Twelve Terms’ on the bodies of whores and patrons alike. Forty pieces of merch ruined. Their bodies had been obliterated by language, all traces of their sexuality buried beneath a storm of words. There was something horrific about the sight of those who had survived a typewriter attack. Their faces scarred with text, as if they had become hostages to some awful advertisement. A few of the victims took to working the streets around the library where bibliophiles sometimes paid them to satisfy their fantasies amid the desolate hush of the reading rooms and the deserted stacks where the only witnesses to this erotic pantomime of the blank body and its printed partner were other words. "
53 " I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase. "
― Will Self
54 " 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. "
55 " 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. "
56 " I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop. "
― Clarence Budington Kelland
57 " The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me. "
58 " I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood. "
59 " I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. "
60 " I wasn't as used to the new dumb questions, so when men I had once thought of as wise daddies now asked me 'How do you write?' I did not try and spill red wine in their suede pants. I would just smile and say, 'On a typewriter in the mornings when there's nothing else to do.' "