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

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

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

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker

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

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. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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 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

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

Nicholson Baker

" 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. "

Nicholson Baker

" 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. "

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

" Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants. "

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker

" Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in? "

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker