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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
Take
Metaphorical
Elaborate
Wing
Prose
Wings
Sex
Firsts
First
Updike

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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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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.
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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 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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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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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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You almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.
Nicholson Baker
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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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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.
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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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
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When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
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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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 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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Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
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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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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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For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
Nicholson Baker