Quote

Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Fact
Novels
Facts
Complexes
Exploitative
Shows
Complex
Staging
Political
Otherwise
Adverts
Stories
Speech
Contexts
Many
Novel
Speeches
Sometimes
Impossible
Grounds
Things
Simple
Repeated

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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.
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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
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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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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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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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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
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For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
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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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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
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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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We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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