Nicholson Baker Quotes

59 quotes in 993 categories

• 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 qualities…
• 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…
• 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…
• There's a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don't otherwise have. But I…
• True, the name of the product wasn't so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time - worse than Edsel, or Probe,…
• Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
• A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.
• Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of…
• But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at…
• 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.
• So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain.…
• 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 off in three…
• You need the art in order to love the life.
• I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal…
• Poetry is prose in slow motion.
• I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
• That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day…
• I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.
• So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading…

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