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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Chance
Left
Thing
Saunders
Precise
George

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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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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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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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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
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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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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
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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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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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Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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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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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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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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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.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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