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Quotes by Nicholson Baker

A slight asymmetry inspired instant fondness.
– Nicholson Baker
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.
– Nicholson Baker
And it isn't that Joyce has some ludicrous Vagi-fro or massive Koosh-ball explosion of a sex-goatee - in fact here hair isn't thicker really than most.
– 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 decided htat if I lost my nerve and couldn't go through with denuding the whole town, I could at least replace the TV Guides in the rack at the supermarket with my personal Tales of French Love and Passion and watch how people reacted.
– Nicholson Baker
I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
– Nicholson Baker
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.
– Nicholson Baker
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
– Nicholson Baker
Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
– 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
What sugar-packet manufacturer could have known that people would take to flapping the packet back and forth to centrifuge its contents to the bottom, so that they could handily tear off the top?
– Nicholson Baker
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.
– Nicholson Baker
Women's anes never used to interest me in my teens and early twenties - I think that they are one of the true acquired tastes.
– 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
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
– Nicholson Baker
So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
– 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
From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.
– Nicholson Baker