148 Quotes by Nicholson Baker

Notes of joy have a special STP solvent in them that dissolves all the gluey engine deposits of heartache. War and woe don’t have anything like the range and reach that notes of joy do.

I’m a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.

One’s head is finite. You pour more and more things into it – surnames, chronologies, affiliations – and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.

And now I’m back outside again sitting in the white plastic chair looking at the dew on the gas cap of my car. A fly wants to bit me on the ankle. The mosquitoes are all asleep. They’re just not out at this hour. Only one biting fly. And a mourning dove, who blows through his thumbs to make that sound.

Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I’d be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I’m talking to. Is that too odd for you?

All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are gong to come tumbling out before you. I’m going to divulge them. What a juicy work that is, ‘divulge.’ Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.

Each decision – to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender – was made at some point in somebody’s day.

I’ve never been a fast reader. I’m fickle; I don’t finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

The nice thing about putting on your glasses in the dark is that you know you could see better if it were light, but since it is dark the glasses make no difference at all.