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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Enemy
Read
Better
Writing
Even
Trying
Work
Would
Stranger

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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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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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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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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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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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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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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.
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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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.
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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.
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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
Zadie Smith
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
Zadie Smith