|
Nicholson Baker - From the Advice category:
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)
Nicholson Baker - From the Art category:
- The Anthologist...
You need the art in order to love the life. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Blocks category:
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Books category:
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)
Nicholson Baker - From the Books category:
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)
Nicholson Baker - From the Books category:
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Complaining category:
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)
Nicholson Baker - From the Creativity category:
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)
Nicholson Baker - From the Difficulty category:
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)
Nicholson Baker - From the Eccentricity category:
I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Imitation category:
- The Mezzanine...
When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Language category:
- The Anthologist...
One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly - maybe - and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Loneliness category:
- The Fermata...
I don't think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Music category:
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)
Nicholson Baker - From the Obsession category:
I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Poetry category:
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Poetry category:
- The Anthologist...
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)
Nicholson Baker - From the Practice category:
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)
Nicholson Baker - From the Profession category:
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)
Nicholson Baker - From the Questions category:
- A Box of Matches...
Why are things beautiful? I don't know. That's a good question. Isn't it pleasing when you ask a question of a person, a teacher, or a speaker, and he or she says, That's a good question? Don't you feel good when that happens? (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Suffering category:
- The Anthologist...
You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Technology category:
Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Time category:
- on rising to work at 4:30 am...
The mind is newly cleansed, but it's also befuddled... I found that I wrote differently then. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Words category:
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Worry category:
Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in? (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Writing category:
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. (Nicholson Baker)
Nicholson Baker - From the Writing category:
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. (Nicholson Baker)
| 
