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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
English
Fiction
Loved
Changed
Growing
Something
Life
Trajectory

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
Zadie Smith
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
Zadie Smith
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie Smith
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
Zadie Smith
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
Zadie Smith
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
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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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
Zadie Smith
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
Zadie Smith
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
Zadie Smith
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
Zadie Smith
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
Zadie Smith
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
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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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
Zadie Smith
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
Zadie Smith