Top 70 Nicholson Baker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Poetry is prose in slow motion.”

— Nicholson Baker

3. “I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”

— Nicholson Baker

4. “The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?”

— Nicholson Baker

5. “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.”

— Nicholson Baker

6. “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.”

— Nicholson Baker

7. “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

8. “Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.”

— Nicholson Baker

9. “You almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.”

— Nicholson Baker

10. “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

11. “A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.”

— Nicholson Baker

12. “I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen – like the iPod Touch’s – although the pixel density could and should be much higher.”

— Nicholson Baker

Featured in: Reading Quotes

13. “Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.”

— Nicholson Baker

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

14. “Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.”

— Nicholson Baker

15. “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

16. “True, the name of the product wasn’t so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time – worse than Edsel, or Probe, or Microsoft’s Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One even comes to be fond of a bad name, if the product itself is delightful.”

— Nicholson Baker

17. “There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.”

— Nicholson Baker

18. “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

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

— Nicholson Baker

20. “I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe.”

— Nicholson Baker

21. “The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I’m very polite in person. I don’t want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.”

— Nicholson Baker

22. “Gandhi was important for another reason as well: his country was suffering under the British Empire, and yet he was leading a very singular kind of resistance to it. At the time he was speaking about the violence in Europe, his followers were in jail as prisoners of the British government.”

— Nicholson Baker

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

— Nicholson Baker

24. “I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing.”

— Nicholson Baker

25. “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

26. “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

27. “As soon as you start doing that – changing things – it seems self-evident to me that you’ve entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it’s true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.”

— Nicholson Baker

28. “I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.”

— Nicholson Baker

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

29. “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.”

— Nicholson Baker

30. “Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child?”

— Nicholson Baker

31. “The function of a great library is to store obscure books.”

— Nicholson Baker

32. “I wrote about World War II because I didn’t understand it. I think that’s the reason that historians are drawn to any subject – there’s something about it that doesn’t make sense. I wanted to work my way through what happened slowly, and look at everything in the order in which it took place.”

— Nicholson Baker

33. “Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.”

— Nicholson Baker

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

34. “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?”

— Nicholson Baker

35. “It’s true that I don’t rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.”

— Nicholson Baker

36. “Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.”

— Nicholson Baker

37. “Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.”

— Nicholson Baker

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

38. “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.”

— Nicholson Baker

39. “Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.”

— Nicholson Baker

40. “The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.”

— Nicholson Baker

41. “Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.”

— Nicholson Baker

42. “But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.”

— Nicholson Baker

43. “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

44. “In fact, you could make the argument that a historian like Shlomo Aronson does in passing in one of his books, that the bombing campaign united the German nation behind Hitler, and actually contributed to the sustaining of his power.”

— Nicholson Baker

45. “You need the art in order to love the life.”

— Nicholson Baker

46. “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

47. “I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.”

— Nicholson Baker

48. “I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war’s beginning phase. It’s truer and more frightening that way – when you’re afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all.”

— Nicholson Baker

49. “And I’ll flip through the newest issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it’ll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I’m a poem, I’m a poem. No, you’re not! You’re an impostor, you’re a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was.”

— Nicholson Baker

50. “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.”

— Nicholson Baker