Top 100 Nicholson Baker Quotes
#1. Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.
Nicholson Baker
#2. Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
Nicholson Baker
#5. You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.
Nicholson Baker
#8. The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
Nicholson Baker
#9. I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.
Nicholson Baker
#10. The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read.
Nicholson Baker
#11. The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.
Nicholson Baker
#12. All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are gong to come tumbling out before you. I'm going to divulge them. What a juicy work that is, 'divulge.' Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.
Nicholson Baker
#13. 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, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.
Nicholson Baker
#14. One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.
Nicholson Baker
#15. In fact, you could make the argument that a historian like Shlomo Aronson does in passing in one of his books, that the bombing campaign united the German nation behind Hitler, and actually contributed to the sustaining of his power.
Nicholson Baker
#16. I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
Nicholson Baker
#17. 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, or Microsoft's Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One even comes to be fond of a bad name, if the product itself is delightful.
Nicholson Baker
#18. Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
Nicholson Baker
#19. Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
Nicholson Baker
#20. I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same - keep what's published in the form in which it appeared.
Nicholson Baker
#21. Anyway, she sings like a mad tropical bird, and it's just a fondue of molten wanting and grieving and the sadness of the large naked swinging breasts and soft olive skin and everything that you wish you could remember and feel and know.
Nicholson Baker
#23. Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.
Nicholson Baker
#24. I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.
Nicholson Baker
#25. 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
#26. Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who bought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities
their brute persistence.
Nicholson Baker
#27. In old stapled problems, you can see the TB vaccine marks in the upper left corner where the staples have been removed and replaced, as the problem - even the staple holes of the problem - was copied and sent on to other departments for further action, copying, and stapling.
Nicholson Baker
#29. You can register a political objection in a number of ways.
Nicholson Baker
#30. I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing.
Nicholson Baker
#31. The nice thing about putting on your glasses in the dark is that you know you could see better if it were light, but since it is dark the glasses make no difference at all.
Nicholson Baker
#33. People don't like to read text on computer screens (and reading a lot of text on iPod screens gets very tiring very soon, just about as soon as running out of battery power).
Nicholson Baker
#34. I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe.
Nicholson Baker
#35. Will you dance for me? Let your breasts roam for a moment
I need to see how they dance.'
'Okay.' She danced, and as she danced, she tried to think of the most delicious salads she could imagine
with artichokes and sundried tomato and blue cheese dressing, and beets, lots of beets.
Nicholson Baker
#36. The damage that you have inflicted heals over, and the scarred places left behind have unusual surface areas, roughnesses enough to become the nodes around which wisdom weaves its fibrils.
Nicholson Baker
#38. History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.
Nicholson Baker
#39. 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 don't find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.
Nicholson Baker
#41. 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 sailing any more in his sloop.
Nicholson Baker
#44. 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 chance to have their moments of sprouting.
Nicholson Baker
#46. Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions - the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible thing as part of an attack on a military base.
Nicholson Baker
#47. And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that's just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It's unstoppable, it's uncorkable. There's no way to make it end.
Nicholson Baker
#48. Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.
Nicholson Baker
#49. 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 take it up again.
Nicholson Baker
#50. I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war's beginning phase. It's truer and more frightening that way - when you're afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all.
Nicholson Baker
#51. 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 harmony.
Nicholson Baker
#53. I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.
Nicholson Baker
#54. Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won't coalesce ever again.
Nicholson Baker
#55. Gandhi was important for another reason as well: his country was suffering under the British Empire, and yet he was leading a very singular kind of resistance to it. At the time he was speaking about the violence in Europe, his followers were in jail as prisoners of the British government.
Nicholson Baker
#56. 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 you want to read.
Nicholson Baker
#57. I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
Nicholson Baker
#58. Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.
Nicholson Baker
#59. Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
Nicholson Baker
#63. I made an egg salad sandwich and took a bite of it over the open silverware drawer. A piece of egg salad fell in among the forks. I swore softly with my mouth full. Another piece of egg salad fell in.
Nicholson Baker
#64. 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 to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.
Nicholson Baker
#65. 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 you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.
Nicholson Baker
#66. There is a feeble urgency behind all forced mannerisms of finery- haste and pomp cannot coincide.
Nicholson Baker
#67. I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue - a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren't libelous or otherwise illegal.
Nicholson Baker
#68. So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Nicholson Baker
#69. Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
Nicholson Baker
#71. It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.
Nicholson Baker
#72. I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen - like the iPod Touch's - although the pixel density could and should be much higher.
Nicholson Baker
#75. The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
Nicholson Baker
#76. Notes of joy have a special STP solvent in them that dissolves all the gluey engine deposits of heartache. War and woe don't have anything like the range and reach that notes of joy do.
Nicholson Baker
#77. What does "poet laureate" mean? Nothing. It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now.
Nicholson Baker
#79. 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 before.
Nicholson Baker
#81. 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 it is free, and it is fast.
Nicholson Baker
#82. In 1855, as the price of paper rose, Dr. Deck proposed to dig up 2 1/2 million tons of Egyptian mummies, ship them to New York, unroll them; and use their linen wrappings to make paper.
Nicholson Baker
#83. 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 I would rematerialize in the room of the person I'm talking to. Is that too odd for you?
Nicholson Baker
#85. In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.
Nicholson Baker
#86. I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.
Nicholson Baker
#87. In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.
Nicholson Baker
#88. Each decision - to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender - was made at some point in somebody's day.
Nicholson Baker
#89. 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.
Nicholson Baker
#90. I wrote about World War II because I didn't understand it. I think that's the reason that historians are drawn to any subject - there's something about it that doesn't make sense. I wanted to work my way through what happened slowly, and look at everything in the order in which it took place.
Nicholson Baker
#91. 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 life, it has no power to sway you.
Nicholson Baker
#92. I ate a vendor's hot dog with sauerkraut (a combination whose tastiness still makes me tremble), walking fast in order to save as much of the twenty minutes of my lunch hour I had left for reading.
Nicholson Baker
#93. The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.
Nicholson Baker
#94. Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.
Nicholson Baker
#95. ... 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, though very briefly, of shock and grief.
Nicholson Baker
#96. For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
Nicholson Baker
#97. A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.
Nicholson Baker
#99. The two plants had a gentleman's agreement going, like the railroad companies and the real-estate speculators in the old days, whereby they progressed together up the hill and into the yard.
Nicholson Baker
#100. One French guy at a bar wanted several of us to "faire le parachutisme." He said it was easy, you just jumped out of a plane. It sounded very exciting but no, thank you. He said "I'm not a homo." I said it's not a question of whether or not you're a homo, I just don't want to jump out of a plane.
Nicholson Baker
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