Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people. Zadie Smith More Quotes by Zadie Smith More Quotes From Zadie Smith 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 luxury writing world 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 expression writing 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 comfort book way When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month. Zadie Smith afternoon war thinking 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 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 swings self thinking There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail. Zadie Smith details perception attention [George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance. Zadie Smith precise left chance 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. Zadie Smith feelings trying giving It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel. Zadie Smith taste ghost talking 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 play years 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 pain meaningful children 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 cancer everyday children For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain. Zadie Smith novel pain problem 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 dying boys 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. Zadie Smith tv-shows political simple 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. Zadie Smith pet people way 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. Zadie Smith good-friend america people 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. Zadie Smith writing people moving 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. Zadie Smith approval made feels
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