Latest Nicholson Baker Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.

  Nicholson Baker

  Simple, People, Sitting

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet". Interview with Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

• A problem that I have with everything fictional is that writers are always having to come up with sudden artillery explosions in the middle of whatever is going on. The characters are having interesting, subtle interactions, or jealousies, or whatever it is, and suddenly some gigantic angry eruption has to happen, a giant gasp where everyone has to scramble around. That's the point where I'm turned off. I want the dynamic range to be a little smaller. I don't like the big false bangs.

  Nicholson Baker

  Character, Interesting, Want

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet". Interview with Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

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

  Nicholson Baker

  Jobs, Confusion, Confusing

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet". Interview with Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

• 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

  Character, Tv Shows, Feelings

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet". Interview with Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

• 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

  Believe, Names, Self

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet". Interview with Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

• In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

  Nicholson Baker

  Trying, Events, Simplify

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet". Interview with Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

• 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

  Writing, People, Trying

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet" by Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

• 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

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet". Interview with Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

• Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.

  Nicholson Baker

  Reading, Reality, Thinking

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• 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.

  Nicholson Baker

  War, Other Worlds, Leader

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

• Gandhi was important for another reason as well: his country was suffering under the British Empire, and yet he was leading a very singular kind of resistance to it. At the time he was speaking about the violence in Europe, his followers were in jail as prisoners of the British government.

  Nicholson Baker

  Country, Government, Europe

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke" by James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• Churchill was a brilliant and inspiring rhetorician, but one of the first things he did as the head of the British nation was to put German Jews in jail. Tens of thousands of Jews - who had just been fortunate enough to get out from under Hitler only a few years before - spent the entire war in jail.

  Nicholson Baker

  War, Years, Jail

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

• Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.

  Nicholson Baker

  Stories, Want, Able

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• There was a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Roosevelt administration to get the stars aligned so that that attack would happen. There's just no question about that; you don't even have to look at the decoding of diplomatic cables or anything else. FDR's own admiral thought it was a bad idea to have the fleet confined in one place way out in the middle of the Pacific.

  Nicholson Baker

  Stars, Ideas, Looks

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke" by James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008 Share.

• The equivocations, the confusions, the contradictions. There's no way we can live through or comprehend something so big that happened so long ago. We've lost true history. But if we are willing to tolerate the contradictions, and if we suffer through events rather than ticking them off, we may at least get closer to understanding what happened than if we grip the handrail of a carefully polished and reassuringly heroic narrative.

  Nicholson Baker

  Long Ago, Confusion, Understanding

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke" by James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• What's somewhat puzzling is that Churchill himself knew what the reaction would be to any sort of aerial attack on cities, because in 1938 he said that in a future war British cities would be attacked by bombing, and that the response would be that all men would want to join the fight because they would be so incensed by this cowardly manner of attack. Which is a very natural response: when something drops on you from the air and blows up a bunch of buildings and kills people in their sleep, the reaction is going to be rage, confusion, and a search for something to destroy in retaliation.

  Nicholson Baker

  War, Sleep, Fighting

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

• Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions - the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible thing as part of an attack on a military base.

  Nicholson Baker

  Military, Bombs, Pearls

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• 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

  Way, Sides, Action

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• 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

  War, England, Colorado

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.

  Nicholson Baker

  Warfare, Program, Chemicals

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• In fact, you could make the argument that a historian like Shlomo Aronson does in passing in one of his books, that the bombing campaign united the German nation behind Hitler, and actually contributed to the sustaining of his power.

  Nicholson Baker

  Book, Doe, Campaigns

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.

  Nicholson Baker

  War, Thinking, People

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe.

  Nicholson Baker

  Thinking, Trying, Sides

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war's beginning phase. It's truer and more frightening that way - when you're afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all.

  Nicholson Baker

  War, Phases, Littles

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

• I certainly felt I had an idea of World War II, and it's probably the idea that many people share: there was this insane aggressor, and there was really only one way to proceed in resisting him. What I didn't realize is that there were many voices belonging to reasonable, interesting, complicated people who had a different way of interpreting the possible responses to the Hitlerian menace.

  Nicholson Baker

  War, Ideas, Voice

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.