Quotes from Nicholson Baker

I am not proud of the fact that major ingredients of my emotional history are available for purchase today at CVS.

After a night of poison, your brain wakes up in the morning saying, No, I don't give a shit who introduced the sweet potato into North America. The damage that you have inflicted heals over, and the scarred places left behind have unusual surface areas, roughnesses enough to become the nodes around which wisdom weaves its fibrils.

I stood in the pose of George Washington crossing the Potomac, one foot on a higher step, one hand on the handrail, gliding steadily upward on the diagonal between the lobby and my destination.

Three kinds of donut—cinnamon, plain, and white powder that makes you cough—were all in the same box, all showing through the plastic window like the mailing address to a world in which everyone spoke with his mouth full.

I disapprove of this text now, but when I was little it bespoke the awesome oracular intentionality of prophets whose courage and confidence allowed them to scrap the old ways and start fresh: urban renewal architects; engineers of traffic flow; foretellers of monorails, paper clothing, food in capsule form, programmed learning, and domes over Hong Kong and Manhattan.

We went outside to practice another lockdown on the playground. Wayne brought along the red emergency bag, which held a key and a whistle and a walkie-talkie.

It's hard to explain why I was so nervous: it was partly that little children are mysterious beings, and partly because I genuinely believed in first grade.

Reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness.

I watched the children leap onto the buses like reverse paratroopers.

The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.

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

History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.

In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

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

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

If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.

People don't like to read text on computer screens (and reading a lot of text on iPod screens gets very tiring very soon, just about as soon as running out of battery power).

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.

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.

You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.

The dumbest thing I ever did was not having children. Absolute dumbest thing. Even worse than selling my bassoon. I see the error now. My sister's kids are turning out great. They were shockingly spoiled when they were little, but now their true personalities have taken over and they're just nice calm tall young people with personalities. One is at Kenyon College studying something with lasers and the other is an intern at a dollhouse museum.

Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life's warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They're just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes.

Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.

There are too many poems about death. Death, churchyards, wormy cadavers. Death is really a small part of life, and it's not the part that you want to concentrate on, because life is life and it's full of untold particulars.