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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Till
Allowed
Artery
Pressure
Banged
Husband
Arteries
Best
Nick
Work
Bleeding
Chapter
Chapters

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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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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.
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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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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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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 cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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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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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
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It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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