Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity. Nicholson Baker More Quotes by Nicholson Baker More Quotes From Nicholson Baker I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe. Nicholson Baker sides trying thinking In fact, you could make the argument that a historian like Shlomo Aronson does in passing in one of his books, that the bombing campaign united the German nation behind Hitler, and actually contributed to the sustaining of his power. Nicholson Baker campaigns doe book I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple. Nicholson Baker sitting simple people Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up. Nicholson Baker writing trying people 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. Nicholson Baker reading reality thinking Gandhi was important for another reason as well: his country was suffering under the British Empire, and yet he was leading a very singular kind of resistance to it. At the time he was speaking about the violence in Europe, his followers were in jail as prisoners of the British government. Nicholson Baker government europe country There was a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Roosevelt administration to get the stars aligned so that that attack would happen. There's just no question about that; you don't even have to look at the decoding of diplomatic cables or anything else. FDR's own admiral thought it was a bad idea to have the fleet confined in one place way out in the middle of the Pacific. Nicholson Baker stars looks ideas 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. Nicholson Baker bombs pearls military What's somewhat puzzling is that Churchill himself knew what the reaction would be to any sort of aerial attack on cities, because in 1938 he said that in a future war British cities would be attacked by bombing, and that the response would be that all men would want to join the fight because they would be so incensed by this cowardly manner of attack. Which is a very natural response: when something drops on you from the air and blows up a bunch of buildings and kills people in their sleep, the reaction is going to be rage, confusion, and a search for something to destroy in retaliation. Nicholson Baker fighting sleep war It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on. Nicholson Baker warfare program chemicals 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. Nicholson Baker replacements facts way 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. Nicholson Baker day you problem reading The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read. Nicholson Baker happen know music way I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing. Nicholson Baker new hard shy life
