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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

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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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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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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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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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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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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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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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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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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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