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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Irrational
Worry
Idea
Often
Ideas
Personhood
Inaccurate
Nostalgic

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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
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When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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You're a library of me.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
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I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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