Quote

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

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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Feel
Tricks
Veritable
Feels
Narrative
Blowing
Way
Finally
Passage
Mass
Reveals
Novel
Passages
Wanted
Trick
Firsts
Blank
Unlooked
First
Points
Clog

More quotes by Nicholson Baker

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There's a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don't otherwise have. But I don't find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.
Nicholson Baker
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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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When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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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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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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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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Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe.
Nicholson Baker
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I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
Nicholson Baker
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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
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I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
Nicholson Baker
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Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
Nicholson Baker
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Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
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Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.
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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.
Nicholson Baker
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The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
Nicholson Baker