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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
Best
Nick
Work
Bleeding
Chapter
Chapters
Till
Allowed
Artery
Pressure
Banged
Husband
Arteries

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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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 had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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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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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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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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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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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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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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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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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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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
Zadie Smith
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
Zadie Smith