“When I’m a teacher, I won’t be using red pens to grade papers. Red pens will forever be associated with criticism and bad grades in my mind. I don’t want this person to get their short story back with harsh red pen marks all over it. Purple is much friendlier.”

“One evening I was walking along Hollywood Boulevard, nothing much to do. I stopped and looked in the window of a stationary shop. A mechanized pen was suspended in space in such a way that, as a mechanized roll of paper passed by it, the pen went through the motions of the same penmanship exercises I had learned as a child in the third grade. Centrally placed in the window was an advertisement explaining the mechanical reasons for the perfection of the operation of the suspended mechanical pen. I was fascinated, for everything was going wrong. Then pen was tearing the paper to shreds and splattering in all over the window and on the advertisement, which, nevertheless, remained legible.”

“My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.”

“I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.”

“For the first time in a long while I was in the mood to accomplish something. I switched off the TV and pulled out the Oriole epilepsy drug ads and spread them over my desk. Then I picked up my red pen and went to work.”

“The owner of The Mandrake Hotel and Resort is a man called Rot, a billionaire like Bill Gates, only nerdier. 
Rot Kugelschreiber isn’t the name he was born with. No, the name on his birth certificate is Dark Jar Tin Zoo. He chose that penname because in German it means Red Pen—and a Red Pen is mightier than a Red Sword, which in turn is mightier than a Rothschild. 
Most of the time he goes by Rot, but occasionally he reverts back to Dark Jar Tin Zoo.”