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Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
Nicholson Baker
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Nicholson Baker
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 7
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
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Worry
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More quotes by Nicholson Baker
The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
Nicholson Baker
I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
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Gandhi was such an important figure to the pacifists of the '30s, and he was such an extraordinary embodiment of nonviolence, that I thought it was necessary to have him in there. When he would say something about the war, it was to some extent news - and he was sure to have a response that was different from that of other world leaders.
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There's a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don't otherwise have. But I don't find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.
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You need the art in order to love the life.
Nicholson Baker
I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks.
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I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same - keep what's published in the form in which it appeared.
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I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
Nicholson Baker
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.
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I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.
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I wrote about World War II because I didn't understand it. I think that's the reason that historians are drawn to any subject - there's something about it that doesn't make sense. I wanted to work my way through what happened slowly, and look at everything in the order in which it took place.
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Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.
Nicholson Baker
Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge you can beef things up.
Nicholson Baker
You almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.
Nicholson Baker
I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.
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Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.
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When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
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I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen - like the iPod Touch's - although the pixel density could and should be much higher.
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For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
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I'm suspicious of full-replacement programs - that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along.
Nicholson Baker
