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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Catching
Bus
Thirty
Consider
Failure
Anyone
Age

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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
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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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