Love is the most melodious of all the harmonies, and we have an innate feeling for it. Woman is a delicious instrument of pleasure..., but one must know the chords, study the pose of it, the timid keyboard, the changing and capricious fingering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of "style." But while style--deriving from... the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets--suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breat...h or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don't rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody's embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer o...r drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is part of the nature of consciousness, of how the mental apparatus works, that free reason is only a very occasional function ...of people's "thinking" and that much of the process is made of reactions as standardized as those of the keys on a typewriter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here is a pen and here is a pencil, Here's a typewriter, here's a stencil,... Here is a list of today's appointments, And all the flies in all the ointments, The daily woes that a man endures-- Take them, George, they're yours!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT... while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathingLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Father told me if I could get my fingers to ballet the typewriter keys... to Nureyev the steno pad everything would be perfect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »