American writer (1957- )
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 desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Fermata
Three men are standing on a bombed-out hillside in the mountains in Afghanistan. Do you recall that episode? They're loading up a camel with some shrapnel that they've gathered to sell for scrap across the border in Pakistan. They're scavengers. Finally here's something American that actually helps them survive--the bomb shrapnel itself. A gift from the skies. And then a Predator attack drone flies by, rmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, very slow, rmmmmmmmmmmm, odd-looking plane, headless, and its camera gets a fix on them, and it turns, rmmmmmmmmmmmm, and some CIA drone jockey sitting in front of a screen sipping lemonade thinks, Woo Nelly, tall guys, long beards, robes--robes? ROBE ALERT, ROBE ALERT, ROBE ALERT, one Adam-Twelve, men wandering on the hills near the caves! Al Quaeda operatives! Could be Mr. Bin himself! So the CIA guy takes another sip of lemonade, pushes a few buttons, and suddenly the three men see this flare of a Hellfire missile, they hear the hiss of it, and they pause, and for some curious reason it's coming toward them, it curves a little, it seems to know where they are, and boom, shreds of blood and tissue, moaning people. I knew, I knew when those towers came down, I knew we would be bombing somewhere very soon. It's what we do. We get as far away as we possibly can and then we deliver the goods.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Checkpoint
I edit with a pen, I write on a computer. I’ve always had trouble with pencils because they get dull so quickly, or they just break, and then there’s that awful shuddery feeling when you’re trying to write with a couple of scraps of wood poking out.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Paris Review, fall 2011
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.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Mezzanine
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
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
Poetry is prose in slow motion.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
You need the art in order to love the life.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
When you have a child, you get a surge of ambition, or a surge of hormonal urgency, to get something done, something worthy of your new station in life.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Paris Review, fall 2011
In The Anthologist, I recorded myself trying to explain things into my video camera, and I filmed myself in various places around the house--outside and inside. I transcribed what I said and cleaned it up, and a lot of what I said in those self-interviews came out in the book. Obviously, I had to make adjustments--but it was hugely helpful. It forces you to say what's true in a different order than you'd say it if you were sitting at a keyboard trying to do your best. You're more honest and more innocent at the same time. You're naked.
NICHOLSON BAKER
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
What does it mean to be a great poet? It means that you wrote one or two great poems. Or great parts of poems. That's all it means. Don't try to picture the waste or it will alarm you.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
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
The Anthologist
Carpe diem' doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. 'Carpe diem' means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin servies. No R. Very different piece of advice. What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things--so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant--pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well--the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Mezzanine
Our daily lives have a kaleidoscopic quality, a feeling of walking down a breakfast buffet and spooning out things onto your plate. And there's a lot to eat at this brunch of experience. Too many pineapple rings, too many sausages, too much syrup.
NICHOLSON BAKER
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
I'm a pretty autobiographical writer. I like a high ratio of true events to made-up events or rearranged events. I've always felt that if you think you can find a way to tell the truth and keep the fictional flux going, it's at least a good idea to try, because very often the truth is more interesting than the posed picture, the tableau. The messiness of truth is a useful corrective.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Paris Review, fall 2011
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
U and I
Notes of joy have a special STP solvent in them that dissolves all the gluey engine deposits of heartache. War and woe don't have anything like the range and reach that notes of joy do.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
NICHOLSON BAKER
attributed, New York Times Book Review, 1994