Nicholson Baker Quotes

59 quotes in 993 categories

• Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
• Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
• I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
• It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one…
• When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
• 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,…
• Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
• In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.
• I’ve always thought of myself as shy,
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
• The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own…
• For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
• I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
• Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
• 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…
• I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.

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