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I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.

Nicholson Baker

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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Furnished
Apartment
Longer
Live

More quotes by Nicholson Baker

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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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.
Nicholson Baker
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When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
Nicholson Baker
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Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
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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Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
Nicholson Baker
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I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war's beginning phase. It's truer and more frightening that way - when you're afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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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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While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
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