Quotes by 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.
• Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
• 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.
• Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
• For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
• Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
• I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
• Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.