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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Novel
Learn
Form
Thing
Always
Smarter

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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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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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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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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.
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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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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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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 guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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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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