Quote

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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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Time
Products
Fond
Wasn
Microsoft
Name
Bob
Names
Delightful
Probe
Comes
Cute
Kindle
True
Forgiving
Forgives
Great
Product
Kindles
Even
Worse
Sinister

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
Nicholson Baker
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You need the art in order to love the life.
Nicholson Baker
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Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
Nicholson Baker
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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
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Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
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 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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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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I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
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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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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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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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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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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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