Quote

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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Hold
Novelist
Good
Simply
Solved
Upon
Recognizing
Intractable
Difficult
Novelists
Loosen
Problem
Suddenly
Fluidity
Come
Keys
Omen
Ultimate
Structural
Without
Problems
Knots
Even

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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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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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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
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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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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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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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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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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
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The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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