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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.

-Zadie Smith

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It Seems That If

Zadie Smith

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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.

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The Last Page Of [lincoln In The Bardo] - Without Giving Too Much Away - Involves Somebody Entering Somebody Else. Not In A Sexual Way. But It Says One Of The Simplest Things You Could Ever Say, Which Is That We Must Try And Be Inside Each Other. We Must Have Some Kind Of Feeling For Each Other And Enter Into Each Other's Experience.

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

Don't Confuse Honours With Achievement.

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

Heterosexuality

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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 Am The Sole Author Of The Dictionary That Defines Me.

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.

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

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

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

- 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.

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.

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

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

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

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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.

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.

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?

Sometimes I Think My Whole Professional Life Has Been Based On This Hunch I Had, Early On, That Many People Feel Just As Muddled As I Do, And Might Be Happy To Tag Along With Me On This Search For Clarity, For Precision. I Love That Aspect Of Writing. Nothing Makes Me Happier Than To Hear A Reader Say: That’s Just What I’ve Always Felt, But You Said It Clearly.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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

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

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

The Object Of The Passion Is Just An Accessory To The Passion Itself.

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

Full Stories Are As Rare As Honesty.

Rarely Does One See A Squirrel Tremble.

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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.

English Fiction Was Something I Loved Growing Up, And It Changed My Life - It Changed The Trajectory Of My Life.

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.

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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.

Writing Is My Way Of Expressing - And Thereby Eliminating - All The Various Ways We Can Be Wrong-headed.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

First Rule Of Writing: When Still A Child, Make Sure You Read A Lot Of Books. Spend More Time Doing This Than Anything Else.

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

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

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?

It Was A Kiss From The Past.

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

He Was Bookish, She Was Not; He Was Theoretical, She Political. She Called A Rose A Rose. He Called It An Accumulation Of Cultural And Biological Constructions Circulating Around The Mutually Attracting Binary Poles Of Nature/artifice.

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.

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

He Traced The Genealogy Of The Feeling.

Each Couple Is Its Own Vaudeville Act.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I'm Most Honest About Writing When I'm Talking To Family Or Friends, Not To Newspapers.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Any Woman Who Counts On Her Face Is A Fool.

You're A Library Of Me.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Step Back From Your Facebook Wall For A Moment: Doesn't It, Suddenly, Look A Little Ridiculous? Your Life In This Format?

Time Is How You Spend Your 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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

All Novels Attempt To Cut Neural Routes Through The Brain, To Convince Us That Down This Road The True Future Of The Novel Lies.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Have An Ambition To Write A Great Book, But That's Really A Competition With Myself. I've Noticed That A Lot Of Young Writers, People In All Media, Want To Be Famous But They Don't Really Want To Do Anything. I Can't Think Of Anything Less Worth Striving For Than Fame.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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's Easy To Confuse A Woman For A Philosophy

Protect The Time And Space In Which You Write. Keep Everybody Away From It, Even The People Who Are Most Important To You.

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

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.

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.

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

Work On A Computer That Is Disconnected From The internet.

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

African American

The Past Is Always Tense, The Future Perfect.

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.

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

Were Meant To Be

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

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

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

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.

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