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Quote by Zadie Smith

“For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.”

Quote by Zadie Smith

Author

Zadie Smith is a British novelist known for her distinctive literary style and profound social insights. Her works cover a range of themes including race, class, gender, and identity, and have been widely appreciated by readers. more

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“I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.”

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“I know a lot of people who read and think: "George [Saunders] is so much fun." There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.”

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“[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.”

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“There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.”

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“I was thinking about the generation before us, like John Barth and all of those pomo dudes who had that idea of, instead of hiding the structure and making it look organic and natural, we're going to put the structure on the outside. But most of the time, at least for me, all I could attend to [in Swing Time] was that act of structural self-consciousness.”

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“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.”

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“What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.”

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“For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.”

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“It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.”

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“It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.”

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