Nicholson Baker Quotes

As a writer, you live in permanent self-doubt; you're on permanent trial.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

Like most writers I spend a lot of my time sort of thinking, "It's such agony, I can't do it."

Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.

You always feel like a hack and a fraud when you're writing. It's just how it goes.

People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

I thought when I started writing that I'd have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn't going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

Once I make up my mind, I'm full of indecision.

These days I am ruled by doubt, and that is a difficult place to write from.

I find writing extremely difficult. I usually have to drag myself to my desk, mainly because I doubt myself. And it's getting harder because I want to improve with every book.

Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the 'I'm a Fraud' phase. You go through the 'I'll Never Finish' phase. And every once in a while you think, 'What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it's received as such?'

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

At a certain point in the writing of any book, you become absolutely certain that it's terrible and is only getting more terrible with every word you write. This is normal. You just have to keep going, push your way through, and have faith that, through practice and experience and determination, you will get to the end.

Every word I write I suspect the next day.

If you're a writer, you're constantly doubting yourself.

Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is.

Maybe I can't write without painting myself into a corner first.

I doubted myself for a long time.

Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course.

Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, 'Am I going to be able to do this again?'

For me, novel-writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, fatally misguided. The challenge has always been in assuring myself that by setting one foot in front of the other, I will eventually make my way out of the desert.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.