Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens. Nicholson Baker More Quotes by Nicholson Baker More Quotes From 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 night book hands 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 forgiving names cute 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 nice song giving 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 upset want people The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living? Nicholson Baker novel answers trying If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting. Nicholson Baker chance moments writing You almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief. Nicholson Baker grief life believe The equivocations, the confusions, the contradictions. There's no way we can live through or comprehend something so big that happened so long ago. We've lost true history. But if we are willing to tolerate the contradictions, and if we suffer through events rather than ticking them off, we may at least get closer to understanding what happened than if we grip the handrail of a carefully polished and reassuringly heroic narrative. Nicholson Baker long-ago confusion understanding I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels. Nicholson Baker suspense-novels sometimes thinking 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 events names order Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber. Nicholson Baker leaving tears unique Churchill was a brilliant and inspiring rhetorician, but one of the first things he did as the head of the British nation was to put German Jews in jail. Tens of thousands of Jews - who had just been fortunate enough to get out from under Hitler only a few years before - spent the entire war in jail. Nicholson Baker jail war years 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 swimming space white So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme. Nicholson Baker curves brain kids A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside. Nicholson Baker roots beer rose Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity. Nicholson Baker able stories want You need the art in order to love the life. Nicholson Baker order art needs When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry. Nicholson Baker reading writing firsts I’ve always thought of myself as shy. Nicholson Baker shy Gandhi was such an important figure to the pacifists of the '30s, and he was such an extraordinary embodiment of nonviolence, that I thought it was necessary to have him in there. When he would say something about the war, it was to some extent news - and he was sure to have a response that was different from that of other world leaders. Nicholson Baker other-worlds leader war
