Quote

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?

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Drawing
Large
Within
Attention
Around
Remaining
Something
Circle
Surely
Circles

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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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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.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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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.
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When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
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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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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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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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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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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
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