Quote

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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Turns
Selves
Free
Owned
Wish
Reminds
Disgusting
Sense
Liberal
Look
Careful
Networked
Self
Consider
Disgust
Looks
Turn
Bourgeois

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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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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
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13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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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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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
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For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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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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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
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