Quotes from Nicholson Baker

The function of a great library is to store obscure books.

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

Love is an amazing magnet.

The doctor's in The nurse is hot Swab some cotton Cause you're getting a shot

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.

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

There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape.... The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night?

I'm often called obsessive. I don't think I am ... but I agree that when I decide to go in one direction I really go in that direction.

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.

She got in her car and drove off. A lot of life is like that.

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

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.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

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 in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

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

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.

You need the art in order to love the life.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

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

you almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.