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. Nicholson Baker Read Quote
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. Nicholson Baker Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I’m often called obsessive, but I don’t think I am any more than anyone else. Nicholson Baker Read Quote
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. Nicholson Baker Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
