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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
Late
White
Didn
Feel
Feels
Different
Nineties
Really
Teeth
Time
Wrote

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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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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.
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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Time is how you spend your love.
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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.
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
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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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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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