Nicholson Baker Quotes

I think that people respond to honesty in music, so I only choose songs that are the truth for me.

I'm not saying that I am all of my characters, but for me to bring a character to life, you've got to be able to find your own truth.

I do have a right to talk about my life, to tell my truth from my perspective.

No one is entitled to the truth.

How do I hold my truth to be the truth when everyone else believes their truth to be different.

A truth which comes to us from outside always bears the stamp of uncertainty. We can believe only what appears to each one of us in our own hearts as truth.

Our opinions are not our own, but in the power of sympathy. If a person tells us a palpable falsehood, we not only dare not contradict him, but we dare hardly disbelieve him to his face. A lie boldly uttered has the effect of truth for the instant.

Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.

No man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

That which one cannot experience in daily life is not true for oneself.

Truth is what the voice within tells you.

Truth takes the stamp of the souls it enters. It is rigorous and rough in arid souls, but tempers and softens itself in loving natures.

Truth is for the minority.

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

There aint no substitute for the truth, either it is or it isnt. You see the truth it needs no proof, either it is or it isnt. And you know the truth by the way you feel.

There's probably a certain confidence in your voice, or something, that is validated. You know what I mean? I'm just imagining if people didn't already say that you were cool, that you'd [have] more doubt in what you're doing. That's not so conscious, but that's part of my cosmology now.

So here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it.

I liked Augustus Waters. I really, really really liked him. I liked the way his story ended with someone else. I liked his voice. I liked that he took existentially-fraught free throws.

In a world of cruelty, sympathy is a crime, and in a world of lies, truth is blasphemy.

I have been the subject of ridicule. People talk about me and they don't know me and this is an opportunity to tell my story ... to have my voice and to set the record straight.

Maybe honesty is overvalued. What's truly priceless is picking out from a stream of falsehoods the ones you most need to hear.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

None of the ways people were talking about September 11 felt right to me. I don't buy into the way George W. Bush talks about it. I don't buy into the way the 9/11 commission talks about it. It isn't that I don't believe them. It's just that they're not the tellings for me.

What draws me to a project is how sympathetic I am toward it, so that I can relax into it and give up myself.

Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.