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

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Lying
Novels
Future
Convince
True
Attempt
Road
Lies
Cutting
Novel
Neural
Brain
Routes

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
Zadie Smith
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
Zadie Smith
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
Zadie Smith
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
Zadie Smith
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People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
Zadie Smith
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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
Zadie Smith
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Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
Zadie Smith
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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
Zadie Smith
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Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
Zadie Smith
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Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
Zadie Smith
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Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
Zadie Smith
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
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You're a library of me.
Zadie Smith
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
Zadie Smith
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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
Zadie Smith
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
Zadie Smith
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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
Zadie Smith
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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
Zadie Smith
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith