I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing.

Nicholson Baker

Categorized in : War England Colorado

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Nicholson Baker

healing world thinking

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

Nicholson Baker

matter book needs

I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty.

Nicholson Baker

grief running grieving

There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

Nicholson Baker

distance struggle book

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

persistence quality book

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

Nicholson Baker

machines shoes adults

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

Nicholson Baker

peculiar worry rooms

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

self names believe

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

credit mistake thinking

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

email writing thinking

Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I'd be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I'm talking to. Is that too odd for you?

Nicholson Baker

talking rooms thinking

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

sides action way

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

friends taken real

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

relative particular

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

Nicholson Baker

reading book reality

Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.

Nicholson Baker

tv-shows feelings character

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

voice sympathy rooms

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

Nicholson Baker

groups novelists world

The function of a great library is to store obscure books.

Nicholson Baker

library obscure book

The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.

Nicholson Baker

confusing confusion jobs