J. A. Baker Quotes

You can get anything from Mozilla Firefox-based themes to nature themes to your own photographs.

But I think it's always difficult when a product that you're using and accustomed to changes.

The average consumer does not know the difference between browser, Internet and search box.

I grew up as an only child. I think it might just be that my dad really didn't care that I was a girl. "You're gonna do certain things 'cause I want you to, and that's the way it is."

Some period of time later you look up and say, "That concern was right on the mark; it happened exactly as I thought it would." So that's been really helpful to recognize.

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.

The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.

Each decision - to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender - was made at some point in somebody's day.

The function of a great library is to store obscure books.

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 nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.

Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.

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.

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.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.

While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.

You can register a political objection in a number of ways.

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.

I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.

If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.

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.

I’ve always thought of myself as shy.

When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

You need the art in order to love the life.

In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

People don't like to read text on computer screens (and reading a lot of text on iPod screens gets very tiring very soon, just about as soon as running out of battery power).

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.

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.

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.

I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.

From the time that I was in high school, my life really revolved around live theater, so it almost feels genetic.

I think the thing that interests most actors these days is the strength and the quality of the writing. I think that's the main thing.

Adventure is not outside; it is within.

When Lord Kelvin was in this country [U.S.], he said that nothing interested him so much as Mr. Hewitt's work and his vacuum lamp.

I'm amazed that movies ever get finished at all - much less come out good once in a while. It's an awful lot of work and it can go wrong a thousand different ways.

I have always tried to stay current.

There's a limit to what I can do with a makeup or with animatronics.

When my parents died, it became clear to me that there was an end in sight. Death was never a real thing to me. And then when that happened I realized I only have so many years left, if I'm lucky.

I love making scary faces, that's just how I grew up.

I feel like I have to top myself every film I do, and it gets hard.

So many people of my generation all grew up with that shock theater package on television of 'Frankenstein,' 'Wolfman,' 'Dracula,' 'Mummy,' all the Universal stuff.