Zadie Smith

It's a little sad as you get older as a writer because you can't include it.

The kind of slang and street language that is in my early novels is antique now.

And so you have a choice.

You can continue writing about that period.

But I could never write the language my kids bring home.

And sometimes one life can cover enormous change.

Like with both my parents, my father's...

standing in the ruins of Dachau, and then he suddenly, it's the 80s, and he's got a little car, and he's buzzing around a neighborhood in Wilsdon with a Jamaican wife and three children.

That's a transformation.

Or my mother, from a tiny, tiny village, an absolute poverty, to the same strange corner of northwest London in this completely other circumstance.

You pass through ages, historical moments, political moments.

It's not easy for anyone to keep...

And sometimes it's also, as I get older, there are things which pertain to age which I'd be happy to hold on to rather than pretend that my mind and thought are the same as a 24-year-old's forever.

That would be, in my view, a kind of bad look, like your mom dancing at a party.

Yeah, he liberated it.

Yeah.

I mean, when I say so, he was 17.

So that's another extreme imaginative jump, right?

To imagine a 17 year old doing such a thing.

When I was 17, I was just smoking weed.