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

— Nicholson Baker

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

I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines.

— Nicholson Baker

It's time for bed. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get in bed, and I don't have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that's kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, it's very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine, twenty nights of sleeping, you've taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.***Some of the books are thick, and some are thin, some of the books are in hardcover and some in paperback. Sometimes they get rolled up with the pillows and the blankets. And I never make the bed. So it's like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. It's a Campbell's Chunky Soup of books. The bed you eat with a fork.

— Nicholson Baker

I want to tell you why poetry is worth thinking about - from time to time. Not all the time. Sometimes it's a much better idea to think about other things. Most of us have a short period of intense thinking about poetry, when we take a class in college, and then that's about it. And that's really all you need. One intense time, when you master your little heap of names - Andrew Marvel, Muriel Rukeyser, Christina Rossetti, Hardy, Auden, Bishop, Marvin Bell, Ted Hughes, John Hollander, Nicholas Christopher, Deborah Garrison, whoever, James Wright, Selma Hill, Troy Baltimore. Whoever they may be. Every so often you remember them. If you've memorized some poems, the poems will raise a glimmering finger in your memory once in a while, and that's very nice, as long as you keep it to yourself. Never recite. Please! If you recite, your listeners will look down and play with their cuticles. They will not like you. But sometimes if you quote just a phrase in passing, that can work. Like this: "As Selma Hill says: 'A perfect fuck makes me feel like custard.

— Nicholson Baker

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

— Nicholson Baker

The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.

— Nicholson Baker

What does "poet laureate" mean? Nothing. It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now.

— Nicholson Baker

Who cares about my cock? It'll fend for itself.

— Nicholson Baker

Why are things beautiful? I don't know. That's a good question. Isn't it pleasing when you ask a question of a person, a teacher, or a speaker, and he or she says, That's a good question? Don't you feel good when that happens?

— Nicholson Baker