Top 39 Quotes by Nicholson Baker

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.