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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. "

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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

You

Away

" Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants. "

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

" 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. "

" It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price. "

" The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for. "

" I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow. "

" 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. "

" For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. "

Nicholson Baker

Control

World

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

" 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

Maine

White

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Nicholson Baker

Political

You