Quotes by Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957)

Nicholson Baker Quotes

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

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

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

- Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

- Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

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

- 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.

- 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.

- 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 all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.

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

- 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 life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like

- 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.

- Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

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

- A slight asymmetry inspired instant fondness.

- 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.

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

- Keyboard work creates a class of unwanted things - one-letter typos, failures of phrasing, bad punctuation. If you don't want to delete these entirely, you can use the Return key to push them to the bottom of the screen.

- Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts.

- What sugar-packet manufacturer could have known that people would take to flapping the packet back and forth to centrifuge its contents to the bottom, so that they could handily tear off the top?

- Books :'a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.'

- The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that's true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Before that Australia. Several days ago it said: "Pop-Tarts is german for Little Iced Pastry O' Germany." Other things I learned from earlier versions: More than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are "frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen." Pop-Tarts are a "flat Cookie." No: "Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER notto mention a queer inch." No: "A Pop-Tart is a flat condom." Once last fall the whole page was replaced with "NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI

- no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck

- A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside

- The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well--the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

- There is a feeble urgency behind all forced mannerisms of finery- haste and pomp cannot coincide.

- 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 fine-haired pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber

- 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

- 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

- 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 the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis