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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Newspapers
Honest
Friends
Talking
Family
Writing

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
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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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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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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
Zadie Smith
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
Zadie Smith
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
Zadie Smith
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
Zadie Smith
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
Zadie Smith
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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.
Zadie Smith
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
Zadie Smith
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
Zadie Smith
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It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
Zadie Smith
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of 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