Quote

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

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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.
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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
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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.
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
Zadie Smith