"I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation."
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Quote collection
Zadie Smith quotes (page 9 of 12)
226 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that."
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"I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific."
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"The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury."
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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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"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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"For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain."
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"These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained."
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"The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with."
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"The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed."
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"Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?"
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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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"He traced the genealogy of the feeling."
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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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"It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it."
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"I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death."
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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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"(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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"We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention."
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