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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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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Fast
Simmering
Huge
Idiosyncratic
Full
Controversies
Free
Messy
Fact
Controversy
Funny
Shocking
Facts
Incredible
Thing
Careful

More quotes by Nicholson Baker

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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'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 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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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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Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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Poetry is prose in slow motion.
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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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.
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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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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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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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.
Nicholson Baker