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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
Best
Four
Knocks
Reason
Word
Adjectives
Sometimes
Hours
Novels
Writing
Happiness
Final
Think
Half
Finals
Thinking
Experience
Clean
Write
Novel
Feelings
Feeling

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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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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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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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.
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
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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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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
Zadie Smith
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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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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Zadie Smith
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
Zadie Smith
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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You're a library of me.
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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.
Zadie Smith
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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
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