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Full stories are as rare as honesty.

Zadie Smith

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
ZADIE SMITH

Country Love Lying People
The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
ZADIE SMITH

Action Alternatives Lack
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
ZADIE SMITH

Insight Novelist Political
I’m very attracted to exile literature – particularly Nabokov – exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
ZADIE SMITH

Home Idea Literature
You can feel bad… I mean, that’s not illegal.
ZADIE SMITH

Bad Feel Illegal Mean
Time is how you spend your love.
ZADIE SMITH

Emotion Express Feeling Love Spend
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

Book People Reading
Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
ZADIE SMITH

Rarely Squirrels Tremble
Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
ZADIE SMITH

Incredible Luxury World Writing
I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
ZADIE SMITH

Belief Fun Heterosexuality
Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don’t join fashionable ‘schools of thought.’ Read everything.
ZADIE SMITH

Fashionable Lubricant School
For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
ZADIE SMITH

Novel Pain Problem
We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
ZADIE SMITH

Attention Ignored Something Worthy
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
ZADIE SMITH

Idea Nostalgic Worry
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.
ZADIE SMITH

Ghost Risk Sublime
One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it’s always smarter than you are.
ZADIE SMITH

Form Novel Smarter

Full stories are as rare as honesty.

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Full stories are as rare as honesty.

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Popular Authors

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