The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
ZADIE SMITHPeople profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
More Zadie Smith Quotes
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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.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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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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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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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.
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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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…They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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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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Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn’t like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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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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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it’s always smarter than you are.
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You can feel bad… I mean, that’s not illegal.
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