Words matter. These are the best Nicholson Baker Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t do all that well in the writerly world. I’m happier being outside the flow.
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
I’m often called obsessive, but I don’t think I am any more than anyone else.
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.
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
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.
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.
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.
I keep thinking I’ll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I’ve read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
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.
Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
Haven’t you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.
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.
