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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.

-Zadie Smith

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All My Books Are

Zadie Smith

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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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It's A Feeling Of Happiness That Knocks Me Clean Out Of Adjectives. I Think Sometimes That The Best Reason For Writing Novels Is To Experience Those Four And A Half Hours After You Write The Final Word.

I Often Worry That My Idea Of Personhood Is Nostalgic, Irrational, Inaccurate.

There's A Perception That Novels Can't Usually Allow For Your Kind Of Absolute Attention To Detail.

Sometimes Allah Punishes And Sometimes Men Have To Do It, And It Is A Wise Man Who Knows If It's Allah's Turn Or His Own.

Make Sure The Lubricant Is Unscented. Don't Join Fashionable 'schools Of Thought.' Read Everything.

Time Is How You Spend Your Love.

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.

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?

Where I Come From," Said Archie, "a Bloke Likes To Get To Know A Girl Before He Marries Her." "where You Come From It Is Customary To Boil Vegetables Until They Fall Apart. This Does Not Mean," Said Samad Tersely, "that It Is A Good Idea.

The Novel Leads You Places That You Never Could Have Gotten To Otherwise.

You Don't Come To Live Here Unless The Delusion Of A Reality Shaped Around Your Own Desires Isn't A Strong Aspect Of Your Personality. A Reality Shaped Around Your Own Desires - There Is Something Sociopathic In That Ambition.

Our Children Will Be Born Of Our Actions. Our Accidents Will Become Their Destinies. Oh, The Actions Will Remain. It Is A Simple Matter Of What You Will Do When The Chips Are Down, My Friend. When The Fat Lady Is Singing. When The Walls Are Falling In, And The Sky Is Dark, And The Ground Is Rumbling. In That Moment Our Actions Will Define Us. And It Makes No Difference Whether You Are Being Watched By Allah, Jesus, Buddah, Or Whether You Are Not. On Cold Days A Man Can See His Breath, On A Hot Day He Can't. On Both Occasions, The Man Breathes.

Asking Why Rappers Always Talk About Their Stuff Is Like Asking Why Milton Is Forever Listing The Attributes Of Heavenly Armies. Because Boasting Is A Formal Condition Of The Epic Form. And Those Taught That They Deserve Nothing Rightly Enjoy It When They Succeed In Terms The Culture Understands.

But Surely To Tell These Tall Tales And Others Like Them Would Be To Spread The Myth, The Wicked Lie, That The Past Is Always Tense And The Future, Perfect.

I Remember So Clearly, In The Early Days, If I Had To Do A Piece Of Press, They'd Phone For Me And Say, 'oh, We're Going To Bring Hair And Makeup, It'll Take About Five Hours.' And I Said, 'well, If It Was Ian Mcewan, Would It Take About Five Hours? Would There Be Hair And Makeup? Cause If That's Not The Case, Then Don't Bring The Hair And Makeup.' So, It's Fascinating That They Just Assume: It's A Young Woman, She Must Want To Be Photographed For Five Hours. She Must Have Nothing Better To Do Than Delight In Trying On All Your Shoes. But It's Not The Case.

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.

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?

If Religion Is The Opiate Of The People, Tradition Is An Even More Sinister Analgesic, Simply Because It Rarely Appears Sinister. If Religion Is A Tight Band, A Throbbing Vein, And A Needle, Tradition Is A Far Homelier Concoction: Poppy Seeds Ground Into Tea; A Sweet Cocoa Drink Laced With Cocaine; The Kind Of Thing Your Grandmother Might Have Made.

The Future's Another Country, Man... And I Still Ain't Got A Passport.

The Greatest Lie Ever Told About Love Is That It Sets You Free.

African American

All Tastes Are Expressions Of Belief.

You Become A Different Writer When You Approach A Short Story. When Things Are Not Always Having To Represent Other Things, You Find Real Human Beings Begin To Cautiously Appear On Your Pages.

... 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.

The Past Is Always Tense, The Future Perfect.

The Ideal Reader Cannot Sleep When Holding The Writer He Was Meant To Be With.

Were Meant To Be

I Don't Keep Any Copies Of My Books In The House - They Go To My Mum's Flat. I Don't Like Them Around.

The End Is Simply The Beginning Of An Even Longer Story.

For Ridding Oneself Of Faith Is Like Boiling Seawater To Retrieve The Salt--something Is Gained But Something Is Lost.

They Had Nothing To Say To Each Other. A Five-year Age Gap Between Siblings Is Like A Garden That Needs Constant Attention. Even Three Months Apart Allows The Weeds To Grow Up Between You.

I Am Very Selfish, Really. I Lived For Love.

It's Difficult To Tell The Truth About How A Book Begins. The Truth, As Far As It Can Be Presented To Other People, Is Either Wholly Banal Or Too Intimate.

Telling The Truth

Last Year, When Zora Was A Freshman, Sophomores Had Seemed Altogether A Different Kind Of Human: So Very Definite In Their Tastes And Opinions, In Ther Loves And Ideas. Zora Woke Up This Morning Hopeful That A Transformation Of This Kind Might Have Visited Her In The Night, But, Finding It Hadn't, She Did What Girls Generally Do When They Don't Feel The Part: She Dressed It Instead.

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.

When People Use That Stream Of Consciousness, It's Kind Of Just A Term They Use For Anything That Looks Slightly Different On The Page.

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.

This, After All, Was The Month In Which Families Began Tightening And Closing And Sealing; From Thanksgiving To The New Year, Everybody's World Contracted, Day By Day, Into The Microcosmic Single Festive Household, Each With Its Own Rituals And Obsessions, Rules And Dreams. You Didn't Feel You Could Call People. They Didn't Feel They Could Phone You. How Does One Cry For Help From These Seasonal Prisons?

Are There Other People Who, When Watching A Documentary Set In A Prison, Secretly Think, As I Have, 'wish I Had All That Time To Read'?

Don't Live In A Way That Makes You Feel Dead.

I Love To Dance, And Sing - In The Shower, Not In Public. Im Too Old To Go Raving, But My Fondest Memories Are Of That Kind Of Thing - Dancing, With Lots Of People, Outside If Possible.

Generally, Women Can't Do This, But Men Retain The Ancient Ability To Leave A Family And A Past. They Just Unhook Themselves, Like Removing A Fake Beard, And Skulk Discreetly Back Into Society, Changed Men. Unrecognizable.

I Don't Actually Believe In The Extension Of Consciousness After Death.

The Arena Of Women's Lives Is Somewhat More Intimate. If A Woman Goes Out With An Incredibly Attractive Man And They Break Up, That Woman Is Not More Attractive To Men. It's Completely Irrelevant To Them. That's An Example Of The Way Women's Minds Work.

Other People’s Words Are So Important. And Then Without Warning They Stop Being Important, Along With All Those Words Of Yours That Their Words Prompted You To Write. Much Of The Excitement Of A New Novel Lies In The Repudiation Of The One Written Before. Other People’s Words Are The Bridge You Use To Cross From Where You Were To Wherever You’re Going.

If You're Going To Write A Good Book, You Have To Make Mistakes And You Have To Not Be So Cautious All The Time.

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.

'a Reality Shaped Around Your Own Desires' - There Is Something Sociopathic In That Ambition.

One Thing You Learn About The Novel As A Form Is That It's Always Smarter Than You Are.

For Me, George Saunders Novel [lincoln In The Bardo] Is About A Problem Of Pain.

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?

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.

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.

No Fiction, No Myths, No Lies, No Tangled Webs - This Is How Irie Imagined Her Homeland. Because Homeland Is One Of The Magical Fantasy Words Like Unicorn And Soul And Infinity That Have Now Passed Into Language.

I Never Attended A Creative Writing Class In My Life. I Have A Horror Of Them.

This Is What Divorce Is: Taking Things You No Longer Want From People You No Longer Love.

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.

Everything Shrinks. Individual Character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

Learning How To Be A Good Reader Is What Makes You A Writer.

When I Was 21 I Wanted To Write Like Kafka. But, Unfortunately For Me, I Wrote Like A Script Editor For The Simpsons Who'd Briefly Joined A Religious Cult And Then Discovered Foucault. Such Is Life.

I Like Books That Expose Me To People Unlike Me And Books That Do Battle Against Caricature Or Simplification. That, To Me, Is The Heroic In Fiction.

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.

I'm A Writer Who Never Writes About Sex. It's So Far From My Own Fictional World.

Some People--samad For Example--will Tell You Not To Trust People Who Overuse The Phrase "at The End Of The Day"--football Managers, Estate Agents, Salesmen Of All Kinds--but Archie's Never Felt That Way About It. Prudent Use Of Said Phrase Never Failed To Convince Him That His Interlocutor Was Getting To The Bottom Of Things, To The Fundamentals.

The End Of The Day

When I See My Friends Engaging In A Twitter War For An Afternoon, I Think That Would Destroy Me For A Month.

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.

I'm Always Interested In The Way People Speak And Move In Their Environment, In A Very Particular Environment. I'm Never Interested In Writing A Kind Of Neutral, Universal Novel That Could Be Set Anywhere. To Me, The Any Novel Is A Local Thing Always.

Sometimes, One Wants To Have The Illusion That One Is Making Ones Own Life, Out Of Ones Own Resources.

[george Saunders] Is Very Precise About What He Is Doing. There Isn't A Thing Left To Chance.

Any Artist Who Aligns Themselves With A Politician Is Making A Category Error Because What Politicians Do Is Not On A Human Scale, It Is On A Geopolitical Scale.

The Lack Of Alternatives To An Illegal Action Does Not Legitimise That Action.

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.

This Is What A Woman Is: Unadorned, After Children And Work And Age, And Experience-these Are The Marks Of Living.

Age And Experience

It Was A Kiss From The Past.

When I Was Young, I Was Very Technical About These Things. I Didn't Like To Admit To Any Intimate Relation With What I Was Writing.

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.

I Wouldn't Write About People Who Are Living And Who Are Close To Me, Because I Think It's A Very Violent Thing To Do To Another Person. And Anytime I Have Done It, Even In The Disguise Of Fiction, The Results Have Been Horrific.

The Library Was The Place I Went To Find Out What There Was To Know. It Was Absolutely Essential.

She Hopes For Nothing Except Fine Weather And A Resolution. She Wants To End Properly, Like A Good Sentence.

The Choices A Writer Makes Within A Tradition - Preferring Milton To Moliere, Caring For Barth Over Barthelme - Constitute Some Of The Most Personal Information We Can Have About Him.

Don't We All Know Why Nerds Do What They Do? To Get Money, Which Leads To Popularity, Which Leads To Girls.

Fate Is A Quantity Very Much Like Tv: An Unstoppable Narrative, Written, Produced And Directed By Somebody Else.

In A Whisper He Began Begging For—and, As The Sun Set, Received—the Concession People Always Beg For: A Little More Time.

Tell The Truth Through Whichever Veil Comes To Hand - But Tell It. Resign Yourself To The Lifelong Sadness That Comes From Never being Satisfied.

And So It Happened Again, The Daily Miracle Whereby Interiority Opens Out And Brings To Bloom The Million-petalled Flower Of Being Here, In The World, With Other People. Neither As Hard As She Had Thought It Might Be Nor As Easy As It Appeared.

Tell The Truth Through Whichever Veil Comes To Hand - But Tell It.

Telling The Truth

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.

When The Male Organ Of A Man Stands Erect, Two Thirds Of His Intelect Go Away. And One Third Of His Religion.

People Don't Settle For People. They Resolve To Be With Them. It Takes Faith. You Draw A Circle In The Sand And Agree To Stand In It And Believe In It.

Then He Gave Her A Kiss On The Forehead That Felt Like A Baptism And She Wept Like A Baby.

You Say You Want To Talk, But You Don't . You Stonewall Me.

It's Gotten To A Point Where Everybody Is Concerned About Their Rights And Nobody Is Concerned About Their Duties.

It's Easy To Confuse A Woman For A Philosophy

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.

Because Immigrants Have Always Been Particularly Prone To Repetition - It's Something To Do With That Experience Of Moving From West To East Or East To West Or From Island To Island. Even When You Arrive, You're Still Going Back And Forth; Your Children Are Going Round And Round. There's No Proper Term For It - Original Sin Seems Too Harsh; Maybe Original Trauma Would Be Better.

Anyone Over The Age Of Thirty Catching A Bus Can Consider Himself A Failure.

Revelation Is Where All Crazy People End Up. It's The Last Stop On The Nutso Express.

World Makers, Social Network Makers, Ask One Question First: 'how Can I Do It?'

Any Woman Who Counts On Her Face Is A Fool.

The Golden Age Of Luncheon Vouchers Ended Ten Yearsago. For Ten Years Mickey Had Been Saying, "the Goldenage Of Luncheon Vouchers Is Over." And That's What Archieloved About O'connell's. Everything Was Remembered,nothing Was Lost. History Was Never Revised Orreinterpreted, Adapted Or Whitewashed. It Was As Solid Andas Simple As The Encrusted Egg On The Clock.

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.

In The End, Your Past Is Not My Past And Your Truth Is Not My Truth And Your Solution - Is Not My Solution.

The Secret To Editing Your Work Is Simple: You Need To Become Its Reader Instead Of Its Writer.

It Wasn't Like The Spare Rooms Of Immigrants - Packed To The Rafters With All That They Have Ever Possessed, No Matter How Defective Or Damaged, Mountains Of Odds And Ends - The Stand Testament To The Fact That They Have Things Now, Where Before They Had Nothing.

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.

I Cannot Believe Homosexuality Is That Much Fun. Heterosexuality Certainly Is Not.

Heterosexuality

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.

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.

Full Stories Are As Rare As Honesty.

He Traced The Genealogy Of The Feeling.

You Can't State Difference And Also State Equality. We Have To State Sameness To Understand Equality.

When I Write I Am Trying To Express My Way Of Being In The World. This Is Primarily A Process Of Elimination: Once You Have Removed All The Dead Language, The Second-hand Dogma, The Truths That Are Not Your Own But Other People's, The Mottos, The Slogans, The Out-and-out Lies Of Your Nation, The Myths Of Your Historical Moment - Once You Have Removed All That Warps Experience Into A Shape You Do Not Recognise And Do Not Believe In - What You Are Left With Is Something Approximating The Truth Of Your Own Conception.

I Recognize Myself To Be An Intensely Naive Person. Most Novelists Are, Despite Frequent Pretensions To Deep Socio-political Insight.

An Essential Part Of Power Is The Freedom Not To Think Too Deeply

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.

She Represents Love, Beauty, Purity, The Ideal Female And The Moon...and She's The Mystère Of Jealousy, Vengeance And Discord, And, On The Other Hand, Of Love, Perpetual Help, Goodwill, Health, Beauty And Fortune.

Boys Are Just Boys After All, But Sometimes Girls Really Seem To Be The Turn Of A Pale Wrist, Or The Sudden Jut Of A Hip, Or A Clutch Of Very Dark Hair Falling Across A Freckled Forehead. I'm Not Saying That's What They Really Are. I'm Just Saying Sometimes It Seems That Way, And That Those Details (a Thigh Mole, A Full Face Flush, A Scar The Precise Shape And Size Of A Cashew Nut) Are So Many Hooks Waiting To Land You.

We Cannot Love Something Solely Because It Has Been Ignored. It Must Also Be Worthy Of Our Attention.

- You Look Fine. - Right. I Look Fine. Except I Don't, Said Zora, Tugging Sadly At Her Man's Nightshirt. This Was Why Kiki Had Dreaded Having Girls: She Knew She Wouldn't Be Able To Protect Them From Self-disgust.

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.

I Tap Danced For Ten Years Before I Began To Understand People Don't Make Musicals Anymore. All I Wanted To Do Was Be At Mgm Working For Arthur Freed Or Gene Kelly Or Vincent Minelli. Historical And Geographical Constraints Made This Impossible. Slowly But Surely The Pen Became Mightier Than The Double Pick-up Time Step With Shuffle.

Try To Read Your Own Work As A Stranger Would Read It, Or Even Better, As An Enemy Would.

But It Makes An Immigrant Laugh To Hear The Fears Of The Nationalist, Scared Of Infection, Penetration, Miscegenation, When This Is Small Fry, Peanuts, Compared To What The Immigrant Fears - Dissolution, Disappearance.

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.

She Had That Thing Most People Don't Have - Curiosity. She Might Not Have Always Got The Right Answers, But She Wanted To Ask The Questions. It's Very Hard If You Are Interested In Ideas And All That, Ideas And The Philosophies Of The Past, It's Very Hard To Find Someone Around Here To Really Talk To. That's The Tragedy Of The Thing Really I Mean, When You Think About It. Certainly I Can't Find Anyone Around Here To Talk To Anymore. And For A Woman It's Even Harder You See. They Can Feel Very Trapped - Because Of The Patriarchy. I Do Feel Everyone Needs To Have These Little Chats Now And Then.

Desperation, Weakness, Vulnerability - These Things Will Always Be Exploited. You Need To Protect The Weak, Ring-fence Them, With Something Far Stronger Than Empathy.

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.

I Just Realized Quite Early On That I'm Not Going To Be The Type Who Can Write A Novel Every Two Years. I Think You Need To Feel An Urgency About The Act. Otherwise, When You Read It, You Feel No Urgency, Either. So I Don't Write Unless I Really Feel I Need To, And That's A Luxury.

I Like Books That Don't Give You An Easy Ride. I Like The Feeling Of Discomfort. The Sense Of Being Implicated.

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.

Most Of The Cruelty In The World Is Just Misplaced Energy.

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.

Nowadays, I Know The True Reason I Read Is To Feel Less Alone, To Make A Connection With A Consciousness Other Than My Own.

Every Genuinely Literary Style, From The High Authorial Voice To Foster Wallace And His Footnotes-within-footnotes, Requires The Reader To See The World From Somewhere In Particular, Or From Many Places. So Every Novelist's Literary Style Is Nothing Less Than An Ethical Strategy - It's Always An Attempt To Get The Reader To Care About People Who Are Not The Same As He Or She Is.

Sometimes You Get A Flash Of What You Look Like To Other People.

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.

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.

It's Got Two Aspects. The Bit That Involves The Public Life I Could Not Really Tolerate And Cannot Really Tolerate. I Just Can't Get Used To The Idea Of Being Somebody Unreal In People's Minds. I Can't Live My Life Like That.

I Know A Lot Of People Who Read And Think: "george [saunders] Is So Much Fun." There's No Denying You're Fun To Read, But As A Writer I Think Of [george Saunders] As, In Fact, Not A Fun And Freewheeling Type But Really An Obsessive Control Artist.

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.

Every Moment Happens Twice: Inside And Outside, And They Are Two Different Histories.

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.

Without The Balancing Context Of Everyday Life, All You Have Is The News, And News By Its Nature Is Generally Bad.

I'm Very Attracted To Exile Literature - Particularly Nabokov - Exactly Because The Idea Of Being Away From Home For Any Serious Length Of Time Is So Inconceivable To Me.

A Lot Of Women, When They're Young, Feel They Have Very Good Friends, And Find Later On That Friendship Is Complicated. It's Easy To Be Friends When Everyone's 18. It Gets Harder The Older You Get, As You Make Different Life Choices, As People Say In America. A Lot Of Women's Friendships Begin To Founder.

Under Every Friendship There Is A Difficult Sentence That Must Be Said, In Order That The Friendship Can Be Survived.

You Must Live Life With The Full Knowledge That Your Actions Will Remain. We Are Creatures Of Consequence.

I'm Not Sure If You're The Person For Me Any More.

Don’t Romanticise Your ‘vocation’. You Can Either Write Good Sentences Or You Can’t. There Is No ‘writer’s Lifestyle’. All That Matters Is What You Leave On The Page.

You Can Feel Bad... I Mean, That's Not Illegal.

Don't Confuse Honours With Achievement.

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.

I Lost Many Literary Battles The Day I Read 'their Eyes Were Watching God.' I Had To Concede That Occasionally Aphorisms Have Their Power. I Had To Give Up The Idea That Keats Had A Monopoly On The Lyrical.

The Nineties, Ecstatic Decade!

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.

You're A Library Of Me.

But Sometimes It's Like You Just Meet Someone And You Just Know That You're Totally Connected, And This Person Is, Like, Your Brother - Or Your Sister. Even If They Don't, Like, Recognize It, You Feel It. And In A Lot Of Ways It Don't Matter If They Do Or They Don't See That For What It Is - All You Can Do Is Put The Feeling Out There. That's Your Duty. Then You Just Wait And See What Comes Back To You. That's The Deal.

I Am The Sole Author Of The Dictionary That Defines Me.

Your Mid-thirties Is A Good Time Because You Know A Fair Amount, You Have Some Self-control.

...despite All This, It Is Still Hard To Admit That There Is No One More English Than The Indian, No One More Indian Than The English. There Are Still Young White Men Who Are Angry About That; Who Will Roll Out At Closing Time Into The Poorly Lit Streets With A Kitchen Knife Wrapped In A Tight Fist. But It Makes An Immigrant Laugh To Hear The Fears Of The Nationalist, Scared Of Infection, Penetration, Miscegenation, When This Is Small Fry, Peanuts, Compared To What The Immigrant Fears - Dissolution, Disappearance.

Jerome Said, It's Like, A Family Doesn't Work Anymore When Everyone In It Is More Miserable Than They Would Be If They Were Alone, You Know?

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.

Weight Problems

Each Couple Is Its Own Vaudeville Act.

It's Still Easier To Find The Correct Hoover Bag Than To Find One Pure Person, One Pure Faith, On The Globe.

I Wrote 'white Teeth' In The Late Nineties. I Didn't Really Feel Trepidatious About It. It Was A Different Time.

…maybe The Whole Internet Will Simply Become Like Facebook: Falsely Jolly, Fake-friendly, Self-promoting, Slickly Disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith

You Are Never Stronger...than When You Land On The Other Side Of Despair.

I Don't Ask Myself What Did I Live For, Said Carlene Strongly. That Is A Man's Question. I Ask Whom Did I Live For.

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.

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.

Pulchritude--beauty Where You Would Least Suspect It, Hidden In A Word That Looked Like It Should Signify A Belch Or A Skin Infection.

Oh, I Know That. You Know Me, Baby, I Cannot Be Broken. Takes A Giant To Snap Me In Half.

It Seems To Me Now That The Deep Structures [in Writing] Are Often Subconscious And Set In Childhood.

Art Is The Western Myth, With Which We Both Console Ourselves And Make Ourselves.

She Loved You In The Morning Because The Day Was New.

The Idea That Motherhood Is Inherently Somehow A Threat To Creativity Is Just Absurd.

You Don't Have Favourites Among Your Children, But You Do Have Allies.

And Now The Moment. Such A Moment Has A Peculiar Character. It Is Brief And Temporal Indeed, Like Every Moment; It Is Transient As All Moments Are; It Is Past, Like Every Moment In The Next Moment. And Yet It Is Decisive, And Filled With The Eternal. Such A Moment Ought To Have A Distinctive Name; Let Us Call It The Fullness Of Time.

I Do My Best Work Under Pressure, So I’ll Nick An Artery, And My Husband Isn’t Allowed To Stanch The Bleeding Till I’ve Banged Out A Chapter.

English, As A Subject, Never Really Got Over Its Upstart Nature. It Tries To Bulk Itself Up With Hopeless Jargon And Specious Complexity, Tries To Imitate Subjects It Can Never Be.

It Seems To Me,' Said Magid Finally, As The Moon Became Clearer Than The Sun, 'that You Have Tried To Love A Man As If He Were An Island And You Were Shipwrecked And You Could Mark The Land With An X. It Seems To Me It Is Too Late In The Day For All That.' Then He Gave Her A Kiss On The Forehead That Felt Like A Baptism And She Wept Like A Baby.

The Very Reason I Write Is So That I Might Not Sleepwalk Through My Entire Life.

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.

Greeting Cards Routinely Tell Us Everybody Deserves Love. No. Everybody Deserves Clean Water. Not Everybody Deserves Love All The Time.

A Writer's Duty Is To Register What It Is Like For Him Or Her To Be In The World.

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.

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.

I Never Bought The Idea Of Individual Genius From Which The Novel Spews Forth. It's Always An Act Of Curation.

...they Cannot Escape Their History Any More Than You Yourself Can Lose Your Shadow.

And It's Just Anathema To Being A Writer. It's Not Healthy. But In Another Way, When I'm Writing, What It's About For Me Is Being Good On The Page. None Of That Noise Could Change The Way I Feel About My Writing. Which Is Not Always Particularly Positive.

When A Human Being Becomes A Set Of Data On A Website Like Facebook, He Or She Is Reduced. Everything Shrinks. Individual Character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

I'm Just Interested In Women's Friendships Generally. It Always Seems To Me, And This Is Just My Pet Theory, That Women Are Kind Of At The Sharp End Of Capitalism One Way Or Another. Mainly Because They Buy Everything. In A Practical Sense, Women Buy Most Things. They're Always Comparing - To Friends, To Famous People, To Other People. An Obsessive Act Of Comparison.

The Lady Was Old, The Lady Was Ill. It Didn't Matter What The Lady Believed.

It Seems That If You Put People On Paper And Move Them Through Time, You Cannot Help But Talk About Ethics, Because The Ethical Realm Exists Nowhere If Not Here: In The Consequences Of Human Actions As They Unfold In Time, And The Multiple Interpretive Possibility Of Those Actions.

These Days, It Feels To Me Like You Make A Devil's Pact When You Walk Into This Country. You Hand Over Your Passport At The Check-in, You Get Stamped, You Want To Make A Little Money, Get Yourself Started... But You Mean To Go Back! Who Would Want To Stay? Cold, Wet, Miserable; Terrible Food, Dreadful Newspapers - Who Would Want To Stay? In A Place Where You Are Never Welcomed, Only Tolerated. Just Tolerated. Like You Are An Animal Finally House-trained.

She Did What Girls Generally Do When They Don't Feel The Part: She Dressed It Instead.

(and Catholics Give Out Forgiveness At About The Same Rate As Politicians Give Out Promises And Whores Give Out)

I Was Brought Up With The Sense That I Was Absolutely No Different From My Brothers. I Went To College Thinking I Was Absolutely No Different From The Men In College. But That's Not True. I'm Fundamentally Different. The Problem Was Not Being Able To Understand Difference And Equality At The Same Time. It's Something That We Can't Seem To Comprehend. You Can't State Difference And Also State Equality. We Have To State Sameness To Understand Equality. It's A Mistake.

People Profess To Have Certain Political Positions, But Their Conservatism Or Liberalism Is Really The Least Interesting Thing About Them.

I Find It Impossible To Experience Either Pride Or Shame Over Accidents Of Genetics In Which I Had No Active Part. I'm Not Necessarily Proud To Be Female. I Am Not Even Proud To Be Human — I Only Love To Be So.

This Because It Is Never Really Very Cold In England. It Is Drizzly, And The Wind Will Blow; Hail Happens, And There Is A Breed Of Tuesday In January In Which Time Creeps And No Light Comes And The Air Is Full Of Water And Nobody Really Loves Anybody, But Still A Decent Jumper And A Waxen Jacket Lined With Wool Is Sufficient For Every Weather England's Got To Give.

Women Often Have A Great Need To Portray Themselves As Sympathetic And Pleasing, But We're Also Dark People With Dark Thoughts.

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