My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

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 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.

I remember being out here at the Sunset Marquis, and whoever knocked on the door, I would take that picture that I was writing and I would put that in the typewriter, so when I had the meeting, they would say: 'Oh, you're working on it right now?'

No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge.

I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.

Much as I like owning a Rolls-Royce, I could do without it. What I could not do without is a typewriter, a supply of yellow second sheets and the time to put them to good use.

My father was a TV scriptwriter. He would perform his dialogue out loud, while my mum transcribed it at the typewriter. So I grew up thinking that plucking characters out of the air was an extremely normal way to behave.

I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.

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.'

When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.

Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don't do anything. I just sort of have lunch - all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece.

I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.

When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he's nobody's friend.

In the future the way that Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed.

I have a love/hate relationship with just about all technology in my life. My first typewriter in particular. I had a helluva time putting new ribbon on it.

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.