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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Kind
Absolutes
Absolute
Details
Perception
Allow
Usually
Novel
Detail
Attention
Novels

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
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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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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
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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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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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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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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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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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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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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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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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I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.
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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
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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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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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