Zitat des Tages von Nicholson Baker:
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.
I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
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.
I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.
So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.
One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.
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.
I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.
You can register a political objection in a number of ways.
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
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.
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.
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
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.