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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

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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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" I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing. "

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" Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast. "

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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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" I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes. "

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" I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else. "

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" I've always thought of myself as shy. "

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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. "

Nicholson Baker

" Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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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" That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before. "

Nicholson Baker

" Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you've watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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. "

Nicholson Baker

" Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of. "

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" One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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

" You can register a political objection in a number of ways. "

Nicholson Baker

" Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants. "

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" Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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

" First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn't problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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. "

Nicholson Baker

" So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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. "

Nicholson Baker

" From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound. "

Nicholson Baker

" Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism. "

Nicholson Baker

" I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels. "

Nicholson Baker