Intimations: Six Essays

by Zadie Smith

But I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

Writing is control.

Experience – mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious – rolls over everybody.

Writing is all resistance.

They were tulips. I wanted them to be peonies. In my story, they are, they will be, they were and will for ever be peonies – for, when I am writing, space and time itself bend to my will!

Disaster demanded a new dawn. Only new thinking can lead to a new dawn.

Snake oil, snake oil, snake oil. The Devil is consistent, if nothing else. I dropped that apple, and, lo, it was putrid and full of worms.

We had dead people. We had casualties and we had victims. We had more or less innocent bystanders. We had body counts and sometimes even photos in the newspapers of body bags, though many felt it was wrong to show them. We had ‘unequal health outcomes’. But, in America, all of these involved some culpability on the part of the dead. Wrong place, wrong time. Wrong skin colour. Wrong side of the tracks. Wrong ZIP code, wrong beliefs, wrong city. Wrong position of hands when asked to exit the vehicle. Wrong health insurance – or none. Wrong attitude to the police officer.

It’s a delusional painter who finishes a canvas at two o’clock and expects radical societal transformation by four.

The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity – and to time itself.

There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love.