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I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Time
Particularly
Exactly
Serious
Literature
Nabokov
Idea
Inconceivable
Away
Exile
Home
Attracted
Ideas
Length

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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.
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It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
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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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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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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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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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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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I know a lot of people who read and think: George [Saunders] is so much fun. There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
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The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
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