Tag: Zadie Smith
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Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.
Zadie Smith
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that’s really a competition with myself. I’ve noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don’t really want to do anything. I can’t think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith
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I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.
Zadie Smith
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There is a kind of desperate need for somebody to tell everyone what to do, which I find really peculiar in America. And then when you tell them, they’re not interested, because it’s also a country where everybody’s opinion is their opinion, and they really don’t give a damn what you think. So it’s a very odd experience.
Zadie Smith
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It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
Zadie Smith
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life – it changed the trajectory of my life.
Zadie Smith
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All my books are made up of other books. They’re all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn’t have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people’s novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
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A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road – you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.
Zadie Smith
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation.’ You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Zadie Smith
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Desperation, weakness, vulnerability – these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
Zadie Smith