Quote

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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Interest
Slight
Half
Lincoln
Without
Sublime
Like
Interests
Argument
Bardo
Exist
Perverse
Couldn
Landed
Balance
Grotesque

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
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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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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
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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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I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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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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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Zadie Smith
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
Zadie Smith