A Quote by Nicholson Baker
The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.
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What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.
The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.
Like when you pick up a book and you don't realize what type of text it is - it could be an essay, a novel, a biography - and at one point you realize you don't know where, as a reader, you want to be. Where are you going with this text? What is the goal? How are you supposed to interpret what you're reading? And people's responses vary - some dislike it, and are put off by the confusion, the lack of comprehension.
Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
We have misunderstood our confusion when we think there is an answer to it. The confusion is not a result of questions that are too hard, but rather a questioner who is disintegrating. Confusion is the introduction to true intelligence.
I wanted to turn everything off, too. Just press a button - click - and shut myself down. Turn off my heart, turn off my mind, turn off my body - just lie there, senseless, like a dormant tree in winter, waiting for the spring to return.
Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place.
Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.
The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader. And so, as a reader you have a task to do in finding those bottles and opening up the messages and experiencing what's in them inside of yourself.
I feel that there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into fantasy and there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into pessimism, but that, in fact, the novel as it has developed should, if it's functioning correctly, have equipped you as the reader to make your own decision about where you want to go with that, about where you're going to fall on that continuum. So, the novel is taking you directly up to the point that you have to choose, and it's letting you do that.
The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books.
I do my job. I love my job. It's the best job I ever had. And it's probably the best job I will ever have. And I serve at the pleasure of the president. That's true of President Obama. That will be true of President Trump. And if and when a president decides that they want to replace me, I'll ride off into the sunset.
No Difference Small as a peanut, Big as a giant, We're all the same size When we turn off the light. Rich as a sultan, Poor as a mite, We're all worth the same When we turn off the light. Red, black or orange, Yellow or white, We all look the same When we turn off the light. So maybe the way, To make everything right Is for god to just reach out And turn off the light!
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