Quote

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
Stop
Carver
Story
Pushed
Stories
Length
Trying
Twenty
Always
Twenties
Like
Pages
Short
Either

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
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When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
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Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
Zadie Smith
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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
Zadie Smith
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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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Time is how you spend your love.
Zadie Smith
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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.
Zadie Smith
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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
Zadie Smith
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I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.
Zadie Smith
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith