Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.
My first typewriter cost me $75. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to earn that money, or how proud I was of that object. I wrote my first books on it. They will never be published, but that's all right.
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.
I didn't know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.
I'm a relic, and things were a lot different when I was fifteen and sixteen. There were no cell phones, no laptops... I learned to type on an actual typewriter.
I think I would die if I couldn't get to the typewriter every day. I really need that.
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.'
I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.
You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.
Sometimes I can think of so many ways of expressing myself that I feel I'm an old typewriter, and too many keys come forward at once - and I get jammed.
I like to believe that I don't think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it's whenever I feel there's something to be put on paper. I don't care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night.
The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.
I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.
