Quote

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Hard
Trick
Writing
Tricks
Main
Confidence
Novel
Alone
Persons
Person

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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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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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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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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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
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I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
Zadie Smith
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
Zadie Smith