By Yong Shu Hoong

Nicholson Baker is the bestselling author of Vox, described by The New York Times Magazine as "the 1992 phone-sex novel so steamy that Monica Lewinsky gave it as a gift to Bill Clinton." But in person, Baker comes across more as a trimmer version of Santa Claus – thanks to his white hair and beard, and that certain twinkle in his eyes.

His first book The Mezzanine, a stream-of-consciousness footnote-laden novel about a young office worker's lunch break, was published in 1988. This was followed by nine other novels, including The Fermata (1994), The Anthologist (2009) and House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011).

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, stirring up debate over libraries' preservation policies and destruction of intellectual content. Other nonfiction titles include Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation (2008) and The Way the World Works: Essays (2012).

Born in 1957 in New York City, Baker currently resides in Maine in the United States. He was in Singapore for six months in 2016 as writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University.

1. What are you reading right now?
I'm reading a novel by Alison Lurie called Imaginary Friends. Why haven't I read Lurie before? She's observant and funny and smart.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
It's been a long time since I've read H.G. Wells's Invisible Man, but I'd like to try out being invisible.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I'm neat and organised and "obsessive". Actually I'm messy and dilettantish and covered with cracker crumbs and full of dying dreams.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
Roger Angell is the living writer I have warmest feelings for – he was my editor for a while at The New Yorker and he has the true writerly touch. He's 95 years old, which is amazing. Once he got mad at me and said "Just sign the damn thing!" And once I went to a bookstore with him, and he bought me a paperback of a book by William Trevor.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
Of course writing is hard, sometimes, but I don't understand the metaphor in the phrase "writer's block". Usually there's no blockage – usually writers are not mighty muddy rivers whose song of self is held back by some giant hydroelectric dam. Often the reason why writers don't write is that what they have to say has slowed to a trickle.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
Gentleness, sympathy, daring, curiosity, nervousness at cocktail parties.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Overconfident grandiloquent self-promotion.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
Updike said somewhere that you should butter the edges of your toast and let the middle take care of itself.

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
sometimes take a shower every other day.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
I'd try the comedy first, and if it wasn't funny, I'd go for the action thriller. The tragedy would be my last choice. I like happy endings.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
One favourite word is plaster. Another is grunt. Some words I don't always like: blog, novel, passion.

12. Write a short-short story in three lines that include the following three words: "hive", "hallway" and "artistry".
A bucket of blue paint sat on some newspaper in a cool room of the Hive, a building on the campus of Nanyang Technological University. A man lifted a brush, dipped it into the heavy paint, and, in sudden burst of exuberant gesticulation, drew the Chinese character for motionless on the wall. A critic, watching from the hallway, shook his head and gave the character three yellow stars, saying that it "lacked artistry".

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A cheese sandwich.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Early morning is best for alertness, early afternoon for despair, late afternoon for stoic resignation.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
I'm uncomfortable at soirees – and at last suppers. I'd want to have dinner with my family and say goodbye. Literary figures would be the last things on my mind.

16. As both an American and a writer, what are the dangers and rewards of being a pacifist in today's world?
The danger of being a pacifist is that people dismiss you without reading what you've said. The reward is that what you have to say makes sense and is the only way forward.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
"What are you wearing?"

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