Quote

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

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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Working
Practiced
Natural
Limitations
Certain
Technical
Hard
Dedicated
Really
Limitation
Musician
Level
Overcame
Levels
Proficiency

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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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.
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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'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.
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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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I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
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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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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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.
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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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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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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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Poetry is prose in slow motion.
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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The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
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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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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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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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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Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
Nicholson Baker