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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Pleasure
Novelist
Lives
Argue
Seems
Novelists
Trying
Online
Really
Arguing
Make
Argument
Always
Perspective
Luddite
Like
Personal
Grumpy

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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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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
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I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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Time is how you spend your love.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express 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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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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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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