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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Reason
Word
Adjectives
Sometimes
Hours
Novels
Writing
Happiness
Final
Think
Half
Finals
Thinking
Experience
Clean
Write
Novel
Feelings
Feeling
Best
Four
Knocks
More quotes by Zadie Smith
For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
Zadie Smith
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Zadie Smith
To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
Zadie Smith
I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
Zadie Smith
There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
Zadie Smith
He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith
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
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.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
Zadie Smith
I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
Zadie Smith
It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
Zadie Smith
Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
Zadie Smith
The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
Zadie Smith
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Zadie Smith
I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Zadie Smith
Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
Zadie Smith
I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
Zadie Smith
Time is how you spend your love.
Zadie Smith
