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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

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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Worried
Letters
Writers
Came
Together
Coalesce
Ever
Happenstance
Something
Randomly
Really
Secretly

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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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The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
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The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
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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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I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.
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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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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?
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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.
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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.
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I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same - keep what's published in the form in which it appeared.
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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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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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Poetry is prose in slow motion.
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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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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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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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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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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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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