Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Book
Aside
Take
Finish
Years
Ten
Never
Fast
Reader
Books
Five
Start
Fickle

More quotes by Nicholson Baker

Image
The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
Nicholson Baker
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Poetry is prose in slow motion.
Nicholson Baker
Image
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
Nicholson Baker
Image
I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
Nicholson Baker
Image
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
Image
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
Nicholson Baker
Image
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
Image
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
Nicholson Baker
Image
Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
Nicholson Baker
Image
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
Nicholson Baker
Image
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
Image
Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.
Nicholson Baker
Image
Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.
Nicholson Baker
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
Nicholson Baker
Image
If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.
Nicholson Baker
Image
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