Quotes by Nicholson Baker

“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.”

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

“Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.”

“The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like”

“Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until youve watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.”

“Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.”

“Havent you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?”

“A slight asymmetry inspired instant fondness.”

“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.”

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

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.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

You can tell its a poem because its swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows its a poem.

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

Its time for bed. And heres what Im going to do. Im going to get in bed, and I dont have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know thats kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, its very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine, twenty nights of sleeping, youve taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.***Some of the books are thick, and some are thin, some of the books are in hardcover and some in paperback. Sometimes they get rolled up with the pillows and the blankets. And I never make the bed. So its like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. Its a Campbells Chunky Soup of books. The bed you eat with a fork.

What does poet laureate mean? Nothing. It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now.

You float like a feather, sings Radiohead, In a beautiful world. Ive listened several times to the Radiohead songs, because it was nice of Raymond to say he heard a bit of them in what I sang. Im not sure I hear it myself, but I am pleased and touched. Sometimes thats what you need, just a quick casual word of knowledgeable encouragement. Radiohead reminds me a little of the songs in Garden State soundtrack. Now, thats a soundtrack. They were all songs that Zach Braff liked, so he put them in his movie. And theres that beautiful moment near the beginning where Natalie Portman hands him the headphones and she watches him listen to the song and she smiles her huge, innocent Natalie Portman smile.

Who cares about my cock? Itll fend for itself.

I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines.

The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.