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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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Human
Beings
Humans
Short
Real
Approach
Cautiously
Different
Writer
Insightful
Always
Story
Represent
Things
Stories
Appear
Become
Pages
Find
Begin

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
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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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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
Zadie Smith
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
Zadie Smith
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Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
Zadie Smith
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
Zadie Smith
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Zadie Smith
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
Zadie Smith