Nicholson Baker Quotes
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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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When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
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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.
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You can register a political objection in a number of ways.
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Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.
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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.
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I’ve always thought of myself as shy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What's somewhat puzzling is that Churchill himself knew what the reaction would be to any sort of aerial attack on cities, because in 1938 he said that in a future war British cities would be attacked by bombing, and that the response would be that all men would want to join the fight because they would be so incensed by this cowardly manner of attack. Which is a very natural response: when something drops on you from the air and blows up a bunch of buildings and kills people in their sleep, the reaction is going to be rage, confusion, and a search for something to destroy in retaliation.
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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.
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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.
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In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.
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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.
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For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
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There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.
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Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.
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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.
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Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
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Gandhi was important for another reason as well: his country was suffering under the British Empire, and yet he was leading a very singular kind of resistance to it. At the time he was speaking about the violence in Europe, his followers were in jail as prisoners of the British government.
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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.
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It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.
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I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
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I'm suspicious of full-replacement programs - that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along.
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The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.
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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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Poetry is prose in slow motion.
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In fact, you could make the argument that a historian like Shlomo Aronson does in passing in one of his books, that the bombing campaign united the German nation behind Hitler, and actually contributed to the sustaining of his power.
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