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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.

-Zadie Smith

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It Seems To Me,'

Zadie Smith

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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.

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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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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.

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 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.

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Any Woman Who Counts On Her Face Is A Fool.

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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- 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.

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

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

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

Were Meant To Be

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

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

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

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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.

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

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He Traced The Genealogy Of The Feeling.

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

African American

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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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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'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.

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.

The Nineties, Ecstatic Decade!

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.

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

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.

Time Is How You Spend Your Love.

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.

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

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

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

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The End Of The Day

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

It Was A Kiss From The Past.

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.

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'?

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

All Tastes Are Expressions Of Belief.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

English Writing Tends To Fall Into Two Categories - The Big, Baggy Epic Novel Or The Fairly Controlled, Tidy Novel. For A Long Time, I Was A Fan Of The Big, Baggy Novel, But There's Definitely An Advantage To Having A Little Bit More Control.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Full Stories Are As Rare As Honesty.

Desire Is Never Final, Desire Is Imprecise And Impractical [...]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Heterosexuality

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

Cambridge Was A Joy. Tediously. People Reading Books In A Posh Place. It Was My Fantasy. I Loved It. I Miss It Still.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

The Past Is Always Tense, The Future Perfect.

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Karl Ove Knausgard

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