Latest Zadie Smith Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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?

  Zadie Smith

  Circles, Drawing, Attention

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.

  Zadie Smith

  War, Thinking, Afternoon

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Perspective, Trying, Novelists

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Luxury, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.

  Zadie Smith

  Real, Writing, Expression

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 150 years ago in [Charles] Dickens's time there was at least a sense of craft. So some of the things people had inside of them, they had the possibility of expressing in the making of things - even in a daily way with their clothes or their food. People made a good deal of both themselves. Now our daily lives are almost all consumption. Craft plays a tiny role.

  Zadie Smith

  Clothes, Years, Play

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.

  Zadie Smith

  Children, Believe, Might

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Zadie Smith

  Essence, Opposites, Perspective

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Zadie Smith

  Self, Comfort, Belief

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Zadie Smith

  Meaningful, Children, Pain

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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."

  Zadie Smith

  Pain, Thinking, Order

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.

  Zadie Smith

  Issues, Bullshit, Essentials

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.

  Zadie Smith

  Children, Cancer, Everyday

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

  Zadie Smith

  Pain, Problem, Novel

• I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.

  Zadie Smith

  Believe, Consciousness, After Death

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.

  Zadie Smith

  Pain, Boys, Dying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.

  Zadie Smith

  Book, Comfort, Way

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.

  Zadie Smith

  Risk, Sublime, Ghost

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.

  Zadie Smith

  Talking, Taste, Ghost

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Zadie Smith

  Book, Views, Order

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.

  Zadie Smith

  Sublime, Balance, Half

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I was thinking about the generation before us, like John Barth and all of those pomo dudes who had that idea of, instead of hiding the structure and making it look organic and natural, we're going to put the structure on the outside. But most of the time, at least for me, all I could attend to [in Swing Time] was that act of structural self-consciousness.

  Zadie Smith

  Thinking, Swings, Self

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The young people have a phrase for this now, which is "slay in your lane." That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, People, Work Out

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

  Zadie Smith

  Perception, Details, Attention

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• [George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.

  Zadie Smith

  Chance, Left, Precise

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com