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Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.

Nicholson Baker

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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Firsts
First
Updike
Take
Metaphorical
Elaborate
Wing
Prose
Wings
Sex

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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.
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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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Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
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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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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.
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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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Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
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I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.
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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).
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When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
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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 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.
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The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
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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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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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You need the art in order to love the life.
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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.
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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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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.
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