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
Person
Hard
Trick
Writing
Tricks
Main
Confidence
Novel
Alone
Persons

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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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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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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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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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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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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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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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
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I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
Zadie Smith
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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
Zadie Smith
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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
Zadie Smith
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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
Zadie Smith
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
Zadie Smith