Nicholson Baker Quotes

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
Nicholson Baker

Working, Ice, Spoon

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

Living, Worry, Felt

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

Life, Power, Friend

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

Best, Read, Sure

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

Love, Ignore, Read

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
Nicholson Baker

Control, Living, Group

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 the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.
Nicholson Baker

Music, Time, Poetry

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

Public, Normal, Eye

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

Outside, Happier, Flow

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. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks.
Nicholson Baker

Love, Music, Writing

I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
Nicholson Baker

Thinking, Enjoy, Sometimes

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

Same, Become, Big

I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
Nicholson Baker

Live, Longer, Apartment

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 the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.
Nicholson Baker

Whenever, Web, Buy

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, but I have to say I'm not a natural musician.
Nicholson Baker

Hard, Natural, Level

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

Dreams, Time, Hope

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

Life, Hard, Whole

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

Else, Often, Anyone

I've always thought of myself as shy.
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 years and then take it up again.
Nicholson Baker

Book, Put, Start

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 event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.
Nicholson Baker

Change, True, Order

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
Nicholson Baker

Good, Short, Write

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 you think you should be doing more of.
Nicholson Baker

Whatever, Maybe, Forces

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

Book, Find, Away

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 - their brute persistence.
Nicholson Baker

Nothing, Around, Books

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Biography

Nationality: American

Born: January 7, 1957

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