Quote

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Children
Read
Writing
Else
Make
Stills
Time
Still
Rule
Anything
Spend
Firsts
Books
Book
Child
First
Sure

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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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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 have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
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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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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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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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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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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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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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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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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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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
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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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