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Zadie Smith Quotes


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Quotes by Zadie Smith

Showing 31-40 of 93 Quotes by Zadie Smith

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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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

~Zadie Smith

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Don't confuse honours with achievement.

~Zadie Smith

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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.

~Zadie Smith

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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

~Zadie Smith

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One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.

~Zadie Smith

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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

~Zadie Smith

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If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

~Zadie Smith

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There's constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.

~Zadie Smith

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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.

~Zadie Smith

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Biography

Nationality: British

Type: Novelist

Born: October 25th, 1975

Links

Find Zadie Smith on Amazon

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