For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry. — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose. — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
Each decision - to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
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… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
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… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
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… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
A problem that I have with everything fictional is that writers are always having to come up with sudden artillery explosions in… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
“The thing about life is that life is an infinite subject matter. At any one moment you can say only what' before… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell.… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
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… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
“Why are things beautiful? I don´t know. That´s a good question. Isn´t it pleasing when you ask a question of a person, a teacher,… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
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… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
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… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
“The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
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… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow. — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
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… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
“The fact that we had independently decided to sweep our apartments on that Sunday afternoon after spending the weekend together, I took as a… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share
