Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Harmony
Component
Gives
Components
Takes
Complaints
Nice
Pointing
Song
Finger
Giving
Added
Fussing
Thing
Protest
Sociable
Fingers
Complaint
More quotes by Nicholson Baker
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
I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
Nicholson Baker
The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
Nicholson Baker
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
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
Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.
Nicholson Baker
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
Nicholson Baker
Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
Nicholson Baker
Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
Nicholson Baker
I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.
Nicholson Baker
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
Nicholson Baker
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
Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.
Nicholson Baker
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
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
I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe.
Nicholson Baker
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
As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.
Nicholson Baker
When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Nicholson Baker
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