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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
Store
Stores
Library
Function
Books
Book
Great
Obscure

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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.
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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.
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Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
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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 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.
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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.
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When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
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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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Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.
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I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue - a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren't libelous or otherwise illegal.
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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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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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You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.
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I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
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You need the art in order to love the life.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
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