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Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Nicholson Baker

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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Motion
Prose
Slow
Poetry

More quotes by Nicholson Baker

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Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won't coalesce ever again.
Nicholson Baker
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Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.
Nicholson Baker
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I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.
Nicholson Baker
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I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue - a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren't libelous or otherwise illegal.
Nicholson Baker
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You need the art in order to love the life.
Nicholson Baker
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Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
Nicholson Baker
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You almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.
Nicholson Baker
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There's a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don't otherwise have. But I don't find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.
Nicholson Baker
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True, the name of the product wasn't so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time - worse than Edsel, or Probe, or Microsoft's Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One even comes to be fond of a bad name, if the product itself is delightful.
Nicholson Baker
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Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
Nicholson Baker
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Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.
Nicholson Baker
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The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.
Nicholson Baker
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Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I'd be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I'm talking to. Is that too odd for you?
Nicholson Baker
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People don't like to read text on computer screens (and reading a lot of text on iPod screens gets very tiring very soon, just about as soon as running out of battery power).
Nicholson Baker
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I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same - keep what's published in the form in which it appeared.
Nicholson Baker
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Gandhi was important for another reason as well: his country was suffering under the British Empire, and yet he was leading a very singular kind of resistance to it. At the time he was speaking about the violence in Europe, his followers were in jail as prisoners of the British government.
Nicholson Baker
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The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
Nicholson Baker
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Gandhi was such an important figure to the pacifists of the '30s, and he was such an extraordinary embodiment of nonviolence, that I thought it was necessary to have him in there. When he would say something about the war, it was to some extent news - and he was sure to have a response that was different from that of other world leaders.
Nicholson Baker
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I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks.
Nicholson Baker
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You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.
Nicholson Baker