148 Quotes by Nicholson Baker

It’s troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians – starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That’s one of their nicest qualities – their brute persistence.

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.

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.

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.

First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn’t problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read.

The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people’s eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.

And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that’s just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It’s unstoppable, it’s uncorkable. There’s no way to make it end.