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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Lincoln
George
Novel
Pain
Problem
Saunders
Bardo

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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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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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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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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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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
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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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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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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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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
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Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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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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