“Fiction needs intellect, but it can’t survive on intellect alone. . .It has to arrive at the other embarrassing things, things that seem too banal to talk about in like the appreciation of small details of things that other people leave at home because they’re not worth discussing…Questions that intelligent people would find too dumb to ask like, ‘Am I really alive?’ or ‘What does it mean to be good?’”
Via Bookforum, Zadie Smith talks about writing and cultivating the banal.
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