"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"
About this Quote
Greene turns a preference into a quiet manifesto: writing isn’t just output, it’s a physical discipline, and the wrong tool can cheapen the mind behind it. The first line lands as self-mockery with teeth. Two fingers on a typewriter “never connected” to the brain suggests not incompetence but a broken circuit: speed without intimacy, mechanism without thought. The sentence frames creativity as something routed through the body. He’s defending friction, the slight drag of nib on paper that forces a writer to keep pace with judgment.
Then comes the class-conscious punchline. “A fountain pen, of course” isn’t merely a detail; it’s a signal flare from a certain 20th-century literary temperament: fastidious, controlling, allergic to mass culture’s shortcuts. Ballpoints become the emblem of modern disposability. They don’t invite composition; they invite compliance. You use them to “fill out forms on a plane,” a beautifully specific image of bureaucratic transit: anonymous, temporary, processed. The ballpoint belongs to systems that move people around, not to the solitude where sentences are made.
Context matters: Greene wrote in an era when the typewriter symbolized modern professionalization, journalism, office life, and the machine-age standardization of language. His resistance reads as aesthetic, but also moral. He’s drawing a line between writing as craft and writing as paperwork, between a personal voice and an administrative one. The irony is that it’s snobbery deployed in service of sincerity: he wants tools that slow him down enough to mean what he says.
Then comes the class-conscious punchline. “A fountain pen, of course” isn’t merely a detail; it’s a signal flare from a certain 20th-century literary temperament: fastidious, controlling, allergic to mass culture’s shortcuts. Ballpoints become the emblem of modern disposability. They don’t invite composition; they invite compliance. You use them to “fill out forms on a plane,” a beautifully specific image of bureaucratic transit: anonymous, temporary, processed. The ballpoint belongs to systems that move people around, not to the solitude where sentences are made.
Context matters: Greene wrote in an era when the typewriter symbolized modern professionalization, journalism, office life, and the machine-age standardization of language. His resistance reads as aesthetic, but also moral. He’s drawing a line between writing as craft and writing as paperwork, between a personal voice and an administrative one. The irony is that it’s snobbery deployed in service of sincerity: he wants tools that slow him down enough to mean what he says.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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