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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Change
Noise
Feel
Particularly
Feels
Pages
Writing
None
Way
Positive
Good
Healthy
Always
Writer
Anathema
Another
Page

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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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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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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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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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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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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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
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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.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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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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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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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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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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13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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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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