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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
Half
Finals
Think
Experience
Clean
Thinking
Write
Novel
Feelings
Feeling
Best
Four
Knocks
Word
Adjectives
Reason
Hours
Novels
Sometimes
Happiness
Final
Writing
More quotes by 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
For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
Zadie Smith
The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
Zadie Smith
The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
Zadie Smith
Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
Zadie Smith
It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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
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.
Zadie Smith
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
Zadie Smith
It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
Zadie Smith
She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
Zadie Smith
What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.
Zadie Smith
A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
Zadie Smith
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Zadie Smith
It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
Zadie Smith
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
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
Zadie Smith
Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
Zadie Smith
This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
Zadie Smith
Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
Zadie Smith
