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There's Something Paralyzing About Being A Writer That You Have To Escape. I Don't Want To Think Of Myself As A Guy Who's Written A Bunch Of Books. The 26 Letters Distance Us From Our Own Hesitations And They Make Us Sound As If We Know What We're Doing. We Know Grammar, We Know Prose, But Actually We're All Just Struggling In The Dark, Really.

-Nicholson Baker

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There's Something Paralyzing About

Nicholson Baker

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There's Something Paralyzing About Being A Writer That You Have To Escape. I Don't Want To Think Of Myself As A Guy Who's Written A Bunch Of Books. The 26 Letters Distance Us From Our Own Hesitations And They Make Us Sound As If We Know What We're Doing. We Know Grammar, We Know Prose, But Actually We're All Just Struggling In The Dark, Really.

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Footnotes Are The Finer-suckered Surfaces That Allow Testicular Paragraphs To Hold Fast To The Wider Reality Of The Library.

I Ordered A Kindle 2 From Amazon. How Could I Not? There Were Banner Ads For It All Over The Web. Whenever I Went To The Amazon Web Site, I Was Urged To Buy One.

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.

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.

When The Excessively Shy Force Themselves To Be Forward, They Are Frequently Surprisingly Unsubtle And Overdirect And Even Rude: They Have Entered An Extreme Region Beyond Their Normal Personality, An Area Of Social Crime Where Gradations Don't Count; Unavailable To Them Are The Instincts And Taboos That Booming Extroverts, Who Know The Territory Of Self-advancement Far Better, Can Rely On.

Friends, Both The Imaginary Ones You Build For Yourself Out Of Phrases Taken From A Living Writer, Or Real Ones From College, And Relatives, Despite All The Waste Of Ceremony And Fakery And The Fact That Out Of An Hour Of Conversation You May Have Only Five Minutes In Which The Old Entente Reappears, Are The Only Real Means For Foreign Ideas To Enter Your Brain.

I Wrote About World War Ii Because I Didn't Understand It. I Think That's The Reason That Historians Are Drawn To Any Subject - There's Something About It That Doesn't Make Sense. I Wanted To Work My Way Through What Happened Slowly, And Look At Everything In The Order In Which It Took Place.

Sometimes I Think With The Telephone That If I Concentrate Enough I Could Pour Myself Into It And I'd Be Turned Into A Mist And I Would Rematerialize In The Room Of The Person I'm Talking To. Is That Too Odd For You?

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.

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.

Books: A Beautifully Browsable Invention That Needs No Electricity And Exists In A Readable Form No Matter What Happens.

But Spending Your Life Concentrating On Death Is Like Watching A Whole Movie And Thinking Only About The Credits That Are Going To Roll At The End. It’s A Mistake Of Emphasis.

Most Writers Are Secretly Worried That They're Not Really Writers. That It's All Been Happenstance, Something Came Together Randomly, The Letters Came Together, And They Won't Coalesce Ever Again.

The Function Of A Great Library Is To Store Obscure Books.

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.

Rarely Do Pens Go Dry In Restaurants.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Problem That I Have With Everything Fictional Is That Writers Are Always Having To Come Up With Sudden Artillery Explosions In The Middle Of Whatever Is Going On. The Characters Are Having Interesting, Subtle Interactions, Or Jealousies, Or Whatever It Is, And Suddenly Some Gigantic Angry Eruption Has To Happen, A Giant Gasp Where Everyone Has To Scramble Around. That's The Point Where I'm Turned Off. I Want The Dynamic Range To Be A Little Smaller. I Don't Like The Big False Bangs.

I Prefer Reading E-books On A High Resolution Lcd Screen - Like The Ipod Touch's - Although The Pixel Density Could And Should Be Much Higher.

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I Would Like To Visit The Factory That Makes Train Horns, And Ask Them How They Are Able To Arrive At That Chord Of Eternal Mournfulness. Is It Deliberately Sad? Are The Horns Saying, Be Careful, Stay Away From This Train Or It Will Run You Over And Then People Will Grieve, And Their Grief Will Be As The Inconsolable Wail Of This Horn Through The Night? The Out-of-tuneness Of The Triad Is Part Of Its Beauty.

History Isn't A Seesaw. If You Have A Really Bad Regime On One Side, The Actions On The Other Side Don't Automatically Become Good. It Doesn't Work That Way.

I Wanted To Apprentice Myself To The Dailiness Of The War's Beginning Phase. It's Truer And More Frightening That Way - When You're Afloat On A Little Dingy In The Midst Of It All.

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Shoes Are The First Adult Machines We Are Given To Master.

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There's Something Paralyzing About Being A Writer That You Have To Escape. I Don't Want To Think Of Myself As A Guy Who's Written A Bunch Of Books. The 26 Letters Distance Us From Our Own Hesitations And They Make Us Sound As If We Know What We're Doing. We Know Grammar, We Know Prose, But Actually We're All Just Struggling In The Dark, Really.

I No Longer Want To Live In An Apartment Furnished With Forklifts And Backhoes.

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I Certainly Felt I Had An Idea Of World War Ii, And It's Probably The Idea That Many People Share: There Was This Insane Aggressor, And There Was Really Only One Way To Proceed In Resisting Him. What I Didn't Realize Is That There Were Many Voices Belonging To Reasonable, Interesting, Complicated People Who Had A Different Way Of Interpreting The Possible Responses To The Hitlerian Menace.

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Writing Has To Do With Truth-telling. When You're Writing, Let's Say, An Essay For A Magazine, You Try To Tell The Truth At Every Moment. You Do Your Best To Quote People Accurately And Get Everything Right. Writing A Novel Is A Break From That: Freedom. When You're Writing A Novel, You Are In Charge; You Can Beef Things Up.

When I First Wanted To Be A Writer, I Learned To Write Prose By Reading Poetry.

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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.

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Most Good Novelists Have Been Women Or Homosexuals. The Novel Is The Triumphant Evolved Creation, One Increasingly Has To Think, Of These Two Groups, Who Have Cooperated More Closely In This Domain Than In Any Other.

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You Need The Art In Order To Love The Life.

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.

Some Tv Shows Are Like Really Good Novels In That There Are Enough Episodes That You Start To Have Your Own Feelings About How The Characters Should Act. When The Scriptwriters Go Slightly Wrong, When They Make The Character Make A Left Turn That He Or She Wouldn't Do, You Know Enough About The Characters To Say, "no, That's Not What She Would Do There. That's Wrong." You Can Actually Argue With A Tv Show In A Way That You Can't Do As Much With Movie - You Inhabit A Tv Show In The Way You Inhabit A Novel.

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.

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.

I'm Often Called Obsessive, But I Don't Think I Am Any More Than Anyone Else.

Of Course, Individuals Are Responsible For Individual Actions - The Pilots Who Flew Over Pearl Harbor And Dropped Bombs On Those Ships Did A Terrible Thing As Part Of An Attack On A Military Base.

A Bee Rose Up From A Sun-filled Paper Cup, Off To Make Slum Honey From Some Diet Root Beer It Had Found Inside.

Many Good Poets Are Really Essayists Who Write Very Short Essays.

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