"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
"Poetry is prose in slow motion."
"You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem."
"Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens."
"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 solit..."
"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."
"You float like a feather," sings Radiohead, "In a beautiful world." I've listened several times to the Radiohead songs, because it was nice of Raymond to say he heard a bit of them in what I sang. I'm..."
"Who cares about my cock? It'll fend for itself."
"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 d..."
"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."