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The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?

Nicholson Baker

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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Life
Answer
Worth
Novel
Question
Answers
Living
Trying
Really

More quotes by 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.
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I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people's eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.
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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).
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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.
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I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
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Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
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A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.
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I really practiced hard and got to a certain level of technical proficiency. I overcame some of my limitations. I was a hard-working, dedicated bassoonist, but I have to say I'm not a natural musician.
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Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.
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Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
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For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Nicholson Baker
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I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle I don't finish books I start I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
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Poetry is prose in slow motion.
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Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge you can beef things up.
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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.
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History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.
Nicholson Baker