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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Library
Essential
Essentials
Absolutely
Went
Place
Find

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
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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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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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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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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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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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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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Time is how you spend your love.
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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 nineties, ecstatic decade!
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
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I know a lot of people who read and think: George [Saunders] is so much fun. There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
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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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We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
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