Thoughts on { Typing | R. L. Stine / Joyce Carol Oates / Isaac Asimov / David Sedaris / John Irving / Kurt Vonnegut

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F.H.K Henrion Olivetti Poster 1950s
F.H.K Henrion, Olivetti Poster, 1950s

“I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay
in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.”

R. L. Stine

“When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it’s not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.”

Joyce Carol Oates

“Thinking is the activity I love best, and writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers. I can write up to 18 hours a day. Typing 90 words a minute, I’ve done better than 50 pages a day. Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put an orgy in my office and I wouldn’t look up-well, maybe once.”

Isaac Asimov

“I started typing diary in, I don’t know, 1978 or ’79, but then the computer changed that a lot. Because with the computer if you were writing and you realized you had three sentences in a row that started with the word “he,” you could fix that right up, whereas on a typewriter you’d think, “Well, I’m not going to change the whole page. It’s my diary.” So that made a difference.”

David Sedaris

“I’m not typing. I write only by longhand. I’ve always written first drafts by hand and then once I was into a second or third draft I wrote insert pages on a typewriter. But I got rid of all my typewriters about three or four novels ago and now I do everything by hand. I write by hand because it makes me go slow and going slow is what I like.”

John Irving

“I’m eighty-three and homeless. It was the same when World War II ended. The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people’s discharges and stuff. And my feeling was “Please, I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?” That what I feel right now. I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now? I’ve wondered where home is. It’s when I was in Indianapolis when I was nine years old. Had a dog, a cat, a brother, a sister.”

Kurt Vonnegut

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