Quote

The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Information
Preferring
Choices
Milton
Within
Constitute
Artist
Stealing
Makes
Caring
Tradition
Writer
Moliere
Personal
Barth

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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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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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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.
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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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.
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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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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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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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 very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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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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