American writer (1957- )
You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life's warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They're just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
NICHOLSON BAKER
New Yorker, Apr. 4, New Yorker, Apr. 4, 1994
That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Mezzanine
I was always a believer, even with word processing, that there’s something useful about having to retrace your steps from the beginning. And you have to print it out, too--you only get so far if you work by staring at a screen, because the resolution of the paper page is much higher. Your eye actually takes in things on paper more efficiently. I can fiddle around with something on a screen for days and think I’m getting somewhere, and it won’t be right. Then I’ll print it out and take it to bed, and instantly it’s obvious what’s bad about it, and I’ll cross out, cross out, cross out.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Paris Review, fall 2011
Was it really that strange? It's a guy thinking about naked women. If you skip that you skip quite a big part of human life. But there was an appalled reaction from some people who had been with me when I was writing about shoelaces and escalators. However, everything settles down, and I think people read the book in a different way now and The Fermata is probably the book women most often bring to readings to be signed. But I admit that after that I was pretty much sexed out, and so I went on to other things.
NICHOLSON BAKER
"a life in writing", The Guardian, February 18, 2009
Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Mezzanine
Love is an amazing magnet.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Traveling Sprinkler
At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history every published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but not recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
There are too many poems about death. Death, churchyards, wormy cadavers. Death is really a small part of life, and it's not the part that you want to concentrate on, because life is life and it's full of untold particulars.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
The dumbest thing I ever did was not having children. Absolute dumbest thing. Even worse than selling my bassoon. I see the error now. My sister's kids are turning out great. They were shockingly spoiled when they were little, but now their true personalities have taken over and they're just nice calm tall young people with personalities. One is at Kenyon College studying something with lasers and the other is an intern at a dollhouse museum.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Traveling Sprinkler
There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape.... 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
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
NICHOLSON BAKER
U and I
I'm often called obsessive. I don't think I am ... but I agree that when I decide to go in one direction I really go in that direction.
NICHOLSON BAKER
"a life in writing", The Guardian, February 18, 2009
The doctor's in
The nurse is hot
Swab some cotton
Cause you're getting a shot
NICHOLSON BAKER
Traveling Sprinkler
I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night?
NICHOLSON BAKER
A Box of Matches
She got in her car and drove off. A lot of life is like that.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Traveling Sprinkler
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.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist