Nicholson Baker

“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”

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

“Poetry is prose in slow motion.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's time for bed. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get in bed, and I don't have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that's kind of weird...”

“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.”

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

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

“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 i...”

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

“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 natura...”

“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.”

“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 to read.”

“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...”