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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Secret
Simple
Become
Need
Needs
Editing
Work
Reader
Writer
Instead

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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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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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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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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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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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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.
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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.
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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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.
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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