Nicholson Baker
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Sit in sun. Sun goes behind cloud. Look at watch. Notice that second-hand does not always point directly at little marks on dial. Sometimes it does, though. Then sometimes it doesn't. Why? Feel panic at how quickly life slips by. Get to work.
—Nicholson Baker, On overcoming writer's block
Posted on January 20, 2003 at 10:24 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
—Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
Posted on September 4, 2003 at 4:47 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
You enter, while studying [the Historical Dictonary of American Slang], the west wing of verbal consciousness—the realm of slangfarbennmelodie," of alliterative near-similarity and drunken lateralism and chiming hostility purged of its face-to-face context and abstracted into music: you are in the presence, at times, of the only good things that a million anonymous bullies and sadistic drill-sergeants and cruel-minded, mean-spirited frat boys or sorority girls have bequeathed to the world.
—Nicholson Baker, "Leading with the Grumper," in The Size of Thoughts
Posted on March 4, 2002 at 9:42 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
A few years ago I did my first reading....Eventually my turn came, and the words that I had written in silence...unfolded themselves like lawn chairs in my mouth and emerged one by one wearing large Siberian hats of consonants and long erminous vowels and landed softly, without visible damage, here and there in the audience, and I thought, Gosh, I'm reading aloud, from Chapter Seven!
—Nicholson Baker, "Reading Aloud," in The Size of Thoughts
Posted on March 5, 2002 at 2:53 PM
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