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. – Nicholson Baker
The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony. – Nicholson Baker
The music wasn’t going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn’t know my way around any century. I was very under read. – Nicholson Baker
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. – Nicholson Baker
I hadn’t played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I’m writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about – dancing and trancing and love and love’s setbacks. – Nicholson Baker
I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same – keep what’s published in the form in which it appeared. – Nicholson Baker
E.B. White’s essays are the best things I’ve read about Maine – especially the one in which he’s not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop. – Nicholson Baker
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. – Nicholson Baker
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. – Nicholson Baker
I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing. – Nicholson Baker
I really practiced hard and got to a certain level of technical proficiency. I overcame some of my limitations. I was a hard-working, dedicated bassoonist, but I have to say I’m not a natural musician. – Nicholson Baker
Haven’t you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in? – Nicholson Baker
I keep thinking I’ll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I’ve read about 20 Dick Francis novels. – Nicholson Baker
Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for. – Nicholson Baker
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry. – Nicholson Baker
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. – Nicholson Baker
I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue – a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren’t libelous or otherwise illegal. – Nicholson Baker
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. – Nicholson Baker
I don’t do all that well in the writerly world. I’m happier being outside the flow. – Nicholson Baker
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. – Nicholson Baker
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. – Nicholson Baker
