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The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
Nicholson Baker
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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Great
Obscure
Store
Stores
Library
Function
Books
Book
More quotes by 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
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
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
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
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
When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Nicholson Baker
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
Nicholson Baker
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
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
Poetry is prose in slow motion.
Nicholson Baker
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
I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle I don't finish books I start I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
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
I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.
Nicholson Baker
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
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
I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.
Nicholson Baker
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
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
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