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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
People
Principle
Works
Principles
Slay
Focus
Lane
Young
Lanes
Important
Phrase
Writing
Obscure
Work
Phrases

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.
Zadie Smith
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
Zadie Smith
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
Zadie Smith
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Zadie Smith
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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
Zadie Smith
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
Zadie Smith
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
Zadie Smith
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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
Zadie Smith
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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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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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
Zadie Smith
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith
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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
Zadie Smith
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
Zadie Smith
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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
Zadie Smith
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
Zadie Smith
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
Zadie Smith
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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith