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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Like
Pages
Short
Either
Stop
Carver
Story
Pushed
Stories
Length
Trying
Twenty
Always
Twenties

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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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I know a lot of people who read and think: George [Saunders] is so much fun. There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
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If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
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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.
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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.
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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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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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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The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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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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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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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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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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