American - Novelist | January 7, 1957 -
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
PersistenceNothingOutSitBooks
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.
PeopleEyeMeetingShyBlushDegree
Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
IceYouIce CreamWillOverSauce
I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. 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.
LoveMusicDanceCollegeWriting
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.
FunnyFreeFastMessyJustCareful
Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
AltruismBecauseWikipediaPartly
Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
WorryChairYouLivingRoomYour
I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
LiveWantApartmentLongerFurnished
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
GoDryPensRarelyRestaurants
That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.
DayReadingProblemYouStopAlways
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.
LifeFriendPowerYouHimOwn
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
BeginningMeControlWorldLiving
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