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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Certain
Profess
Thing
Conservatism
Really
Positions
People
Liberalism
Position
Least
Interesting
Political
More quotes by Zadie Smith
Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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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.
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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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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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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
Zadie Smith
You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
Zadie Smith
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.
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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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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.
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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
Zadie Smith
She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
Zadie Smith
For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
Zadie Smith
Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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