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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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Like
Discovered
Kafka
Scripts
Briefly
Wrote
Editor
Religious
Joined
Write
Cult
Wanted
Editors
Writing
Unfortunately
Life
Script
Foucault

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
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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.
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And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
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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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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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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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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
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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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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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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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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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