A biography for Nicholson Bakerhasn’t been written yet.
“From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.”
“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.”
“I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.”
“When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.”
“So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.”
“While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.”
“I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.”
“The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.”
“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.”
“I've always thought of myself as shy.”