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Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.

Nicholson Baker

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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Partly
Flourished
Shrine
Shrines
Altruism

More quotes by Nicholson Baker

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Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.
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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E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.
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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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
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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 keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
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
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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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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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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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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 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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Poetry is prose in slow motion.
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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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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If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.
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