Nicholson Baker

I’ve always thought of myself as shy,

— Nicholson Baker

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

— Nicholson Baker

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

— Nicholson Baker

“...no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck.”

— Nicholson Baker

You need the art in order to love the life.

— Nicholson Baker

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

— Nicholson Baker

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

— Nicholson Baker

Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

— Nicholson Baker

A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found…

— Nicholson Baker

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

— Nicholson Baker

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

— Nicholson Baker

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

— Nicholson Baker

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

— Nicholson Baker

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

— Nicholson Baker

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

— Nicholson Baker

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

— Nicholson Baker

Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich…

— Nicholson Baker

Each decision - to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to…

— Nicholson Baker

In fact, you could make the argument that a historian like Shlomo Aronson does in passing in one of his books, that…

— Nicholson Baker

It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the…

— Nicholson Baker

That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop…

— Nicholson Baker

“The two plants had a gentleman's agreement going, like the railroad companies and the real-estate speculators in the old days, whereby they…

— Nicholson Baker

I really practiced hard and got to a certain level of technical proficiency. I overcame some of my limitations. I was a…

— Nicholson Baker

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…

— Nicholson Baker

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

I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try…

— Nicholson Baker

Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving…

— Nicholson Baker

As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of…

— Nicholson Baker

The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply…

— Nicholson Baker

There's a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don't otherwise…

— Nicholson Baker

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

Gandhi was such an important figure to the pacifists of the '30s, and he was such an extraordinary embodiment of nonviolence, that…

— Nicholson Baker

“The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of…

— Nicholson Baker

“Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think…

— Nicholson Baker

“The thing about life is that life is an infinite subject matter. At any one moment you can say only what' before…

— Nicholson Baker

“And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, "How do you achieve the presence of mind to…

— Nicholson Baker

What's somewhat puzzling is that Churchill himself knew what the reaction would be to any sort of aerial attack on cities, because…

— Nicholson Baker

“You’ve got to get cold to get warm,” Phoebe said. Now that is the truth. That is so true about so many…

— Nicholson Baker

“There's something narcissistic in the phrase "collected poems." Who's collecting them? The poem. How hard is that? That's not a real collection.…

— Nicholson Baker

“The address of the Tip O'Neill building is 10 Causeway Street. It may be torn down soon, because it is one of…

— Nicholson Baker