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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Feels
Different
Nineties
Really
Teeth
Time
Wrote
Late
White
Didn
Feel
More quotes by Zadie Smith
The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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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.
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.
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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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