Nicholson Baker Quotes

59 quotes in 993 categories

• I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.
• 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…
• Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
• When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
• 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…
• Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
• You can register a political objection in a number of ways.
• 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…
• From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from…
• 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.
• Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I'd be turned into a mist and…
• Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite…
• 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…
• 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.…
• I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same -…
• 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…
• I really practiced hard and got to a certain level of technical proficiency. I overcame some of my limitations. I was a hard-working, dedicated bassoonist,…
• I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue - a bin…
• 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…
• One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels,…

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