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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.

Zadie Smith

Full stories are as rare as honesty.
ZADIE SMITH

Coverage Emotion Full Honesty Story
The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
ZADIE SMITH

Edit Secret Simple
One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it’s always smarter than you are.
ZADIE SMITH

Form Novel Smarter
I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
ZADIE SMITH

Belief Fun Heterosexuality
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
Time is how you spend your love.
ZADIE SMITH

Emotion Express Feeling Love Spend
Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
ZADIE SMITH

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

Country Love Lying People
…They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
ZADIE SMITH

Lose Shadow Teeth White
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
For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
ZADIE SMITH

Novel Pain Problem
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.
ZADIE SMITH

Book People Reveal Tell Truth
I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
ZADIE SMITH

Author Define Dictionary Sole
You can feel bad… I mean, that’s not illegal.
ZADIE SMITH

Bad Feel Illegal Mean
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
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.
ZADIE SMITH

Out People Work Writing

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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