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 SMITHThe greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
More Zadie Smith Quotes
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Time is how you spend your love.
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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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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don’t join fashionable ‘schools of thought.’ Read everything.
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You’re a library of me.
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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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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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…They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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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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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is “slay in your lane.” That’s a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can’t do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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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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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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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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