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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Feel
Feels
Work
Made
Always
Approval
Felt
Hard

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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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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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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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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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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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'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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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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