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Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Nicholson Baker

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Nicholson Baker
Age: 68
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Book
Wider
Library
Surface
Testicular
Fast
Paragraphs
Allow
Footnotes
Hold
Surfaces
Reading
Finer
Reality
Paragraph

More quotes by 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.
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I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
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Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
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Poetry is prose in slow motion.
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Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.
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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.
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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
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It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.
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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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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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I'm suspicious of full-replacement programs - that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along.
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I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
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I wrote about World War II because I didn't understand it. I think that's the reason that historians are drawn to any subject - there's something about it that doesn't make sense. I wanted to work my way through what happened slowly, and look at everything in the order in which it took place.
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I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen - like the iPod Touch's - although the pixel density could and should be much higher.
Nicholson Baker
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I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.
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The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
Nicholson Baker
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You need the art in order to love the life.
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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When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Nicholson Baker
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The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.
Nicholson Baker