Quote

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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Subjects
Bulk
Nature
Jargon
Imitate
Trying
Tries
Really
Hopeless
Never
Complexity
English
Upstart
Subject
Specious

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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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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I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
Zadie Smith
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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.
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
Zadie Smith
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
Zadie Smith
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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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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
Zadie Smith
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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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