Nicholson Baker Quotes

Author Image

Nicholson Baker

Profession : Novelist

Birth : January 7, 1957

I've always thought of myself as shy.

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker

Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

Nicholson Baker

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

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

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

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker

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

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

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

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

Nicholson Baker

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

Nicholson Baker

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

Nicholson Baker

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

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

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

You can register a political objection in a number of ways.

Nicholson Baker