Nicholson Baker Quotes & Sayings

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”