Nicholson Baker

(304 votes)   Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.

Nicholson Baker
1957-, American Author

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(257 votes)   In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.

Nicholson Baker
1957-, American Author

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(210 votes)   Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Nicholson Baker
1957-, American Author

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(165 votes)   The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.

Nicholson Baker
1957-, American Author

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(26 votes)   Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Nicholson Baker
American, Novelist Quotes

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(25 votes)   Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

Nicholson Baker
American, Novelist Quotes

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(23 votes)   I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.

Nicholson Baker
American, Novelist Quotes

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(22 votes)   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
American, Novelist Quotes

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(20 votes)   For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Nicholson Baker
American, Novelist Quotes

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(20 votes)   Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

Nicholson Baker
American, Novelist Quotes

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(20 votes)   Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

Nicholson Baker
American, Novelist Quotes

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(20 votes)   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
American, Novelist Quotes

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(18 votes)   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
American, Novelist Quotes

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