Nicholson Baker Quotes (15 Quotes)

In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.

After all, I had never typed the word butthole before in my life. It isn't a word that comes up much in business correspondence.

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. . .

Keyboard work creates a class of unwanted things - one-letter typos, failures of phrasing, bad punctuation. If you don't want to delete these entirely, you can use the Return key to push them to the bottom of the screen.

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

Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

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

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.

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

Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras they can clip and braid their hair they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts.

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.

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

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

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

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.