Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker is an American novelist and writer, born in New York City on January 7, 1957.
Baker received his education across three institutions: the School Without Walls, the Eastman School of Music, and Haverford College. This passage through music conservatory training and liberal arts study preceded his career as a novelist working in the English language.
The Mezzanine stands among his notable works. Baker has received recognition in both literary and public-interest spheres, earning a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, and the James Madison Freedom of Information Award.
The breadth of those honors — spanning fiction, nonfiction, and freedom of information advocacy — reflects the range of work Baker has produced as an American novelist and writer.
Quotes by Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker's insights on:
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.
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.
Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you’ve watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.
Most writers are secretly worried that they’re not really writers. That it’s all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won’t coalesce ever again.
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.
I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue – a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren’t libelous or otherwise illegal.
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.
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies – and it is free, and it is fast.
In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I’m trying to get at more efficiently.