B. Smith Quotes

Drugs are fine for you alone at home, but when it comes to being a family, which a band is, it just messes everything up.

I think that when people download the record they're kind of missing out on part of the experience, because it's really meant to be an immersive experience.

The touring band is DIIV, and the songs are always written with them in mind. But the new record is going to be more "me."

For me, it's always been important to have the live band be one thing, and the recorded band be kind of another thing.

I had to have the record literally taken away from me. I am such a perfectionist.

Recovery culture teaches you that you have to repent. I don't think that's necessary.

I guess I do feel the need to repent. I do feel like I owe the world a great album. I don't know why I feel that way. I just do.

When I read about myself and how writers have focused on negative stuff, it hurts my feelings.

Music journalists are some of the lazy, most uninspired, dull people I've ever met...

The music starts as being way separate from the lyrics, and I write - I have notebooks that I fill with drawings and just words, and stuff that I've written.

Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.

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.

Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.

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.

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.

The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.

Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.

Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.

'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.

She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.

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?

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.

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.

In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.

She loved you in the morning because the day was new.

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.

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.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy

The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.

Each couple is its own vaudeville act.

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.

It was a kiss from the past.

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

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.

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 see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

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.

I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.