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Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith Quotes

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Famous Zadie Smith Quotes

“The profound misapprehension of reality is what, more or less, constitutes the mental state we used to call “madness,” and when the world itself turns unrecognizable, appears to go “mad,” I find myself wondering what the effect is on those who never in the first place experienced a smooth relation between the phenomena of the world and their own minds. Who have always felt an explanatory gap. The schizophrenic. The disassociated… I was left with the useless thoughts of a novelist: what is it like to have a mind-on-fire at such a moment? Do you feel ever more distant from the world? Or has the world, in its new extremity, finally come to you?”

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“Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.”

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Author:Zadie Smith
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“A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.”

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Author:Zadie Smith
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“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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Author:Zadie Smith
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“This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?”

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Author:Zadie Smith
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