"When I write I am trying to express……" — Zadie Smith
"When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception."
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Zadie Smith
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191 Quotes by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith has 191 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped…
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most…
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Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It…
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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this…
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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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…
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Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people…
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I remember so clearly, in the early days, if I had to do a piece of press, they'd phone for…
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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
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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…
See all 191 quotes by Zadie Smith »
More All Quotes
This quote is filed under All Quotes,
one of 128,558 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally…
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No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our…
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The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all…
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The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes…
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Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of…
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We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and…
— Hannah Arendt
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I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is…
— Pietro Aretino
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We must all make peace so that we can all live in peace.
— Jean-Bertrand Aristide
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The spirit of Ubuntu, that once led Haiti to emerge as the first independent black nation in 1804, helped Venezuela,…
— Jean-Bertrand Aristide
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As we all know, many people remain buried under tons of rubble and debris, waiting to be rescued. When we…
— Jean-Bertrand Aristide
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Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.
— Aristophanes
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A friend to all is a friend to none.
— Aristotle
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