Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Zadie Smith, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Zadie Smith quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 391 Zadie Smith quotes for you to read and share.

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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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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived. -- Zadie Smith
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated. -- Zadie Smith
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Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language. -- Zadie Smith
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Archie's marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home, and finding they don't fit. -- Zadie Smith
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My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity ... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity. -- Zadie Smith
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There's never any knowing - how am I to put it? - which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever. - E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread -- Zadie Smith
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When all the time it was that grand tree, taking up half the garden with its roots and not allowing anything else to grow. -- Zadie Smith
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Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And -- Zadie Smith
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Cigarettes took them to medals, which took them to guns, which took them to radios, which took them to jeeps. By midnight, Samad had won three jeeps, seven guns, fourteen medals, the land attached to Gozan's sister's house, and an IOU for four horses, three chickens and a duck. -- 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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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control. -- Zadie Smith
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I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage. -- Zadie Smith
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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that. -- Zadie Smith
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Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other's pockets ... one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to becoming uninvolved. -- Zadie Smith
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Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She's not the kind of person who leaves your life when she's in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business...it just goes. -- Zadie Smith
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And I'm not going to get any thinner or any younger, my ass is going to hit the ground, if it hasn't already
and I want to be with somebody who can still see me in here. I'm still in here. And I don't want to be resented or despised for changing ... I'd rather be alone. -- Zadie Smith
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The thing I feared was no longer my parents' authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets. -- Zadie Smith
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Not everyone wants this conventional little life you're rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire. And when it's time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I'm not afraid. -- Zadie Smith
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As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these. -- Zadie Smith
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It's such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone. -- Zadie Smith
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Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count. -- 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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Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers. -- Zadie Smith
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I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human - I only love to be so. -- Zadie Smith
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My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world. -- Zadie Smith
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She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her. -- Zadie Smith
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Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk into the blackness. -- Zadie Smith
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby. -- Zadie Smith
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And I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn's famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships - all relations - involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power? -- Zadie Smith
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They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow. -- Zadie Smith
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind. -- Zadie Smith
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble. -- Zadie Smith
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American houses ... ' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean? -- Zadie Smith
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One just has to look at the thing from a perspective that interests you personally. -- Zadie Smith
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Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts; ... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul. -- Zadie Smith
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Poverty is not just a headline, my love, it's a lived reality, on the ground - and education is at the heart of it." "I -- 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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It hurts to look at what you can't have -- Zadie Smith
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You're a library of me. -- Zadie Smith
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The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it ... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury. -- Zadie Smith
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I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab. -- Zadie Smith
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As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues. -- Zadie Smith
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Archie says -Science- the same way he says -Modern-, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them. -- Zadie Smith
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When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgement. 'Whatever, -- Zadie Smith
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A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward. -- Zadie Smith
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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. -- Zadie Smith
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not. -- Zadie Smith
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- You look fine.
- Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. -- Zadie Smith
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down. -- Zadie Smith
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Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. -- Zadie Smith
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But the Alim laughed at this. 'And we know who they are. Allah have pity on the Anglicans! Samad, when the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intellect go away,' said the Alim, shaking his head. 'And one third of his religion. -- Zadie Smith
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Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her."
"Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea. -- Zadie Smith
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Full stories are as rare as honesty. -- Zadie Smith
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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals
that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign. -- Zadie Smith
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd. -- Zadie Smith
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It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees. -- Zadie Smith
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer. -- Zadie Smith
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My late twenties had passed in a weird state of timelessness, and I think now that not everyone could have fallen into a life like that, that I must have been somehow primed for it. -- Zadie Smith
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead. -- Zadie Smith
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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties. -- Zadie Smith
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[Forster] quotes approvingly from this discussion, from The Magic Flute [by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson]
"Lord Buddha was your gospel true?"
"True and False."
"What was true in it?"
"Selflessness and Love."
"What false?"
"Flight from Life. -- Zadie Smith
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He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice. -- Zadie Smith
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It's like that quote: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' The choice between a duty or a principle, you know? -- Zadie Smith
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A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow. -- Zadie Smith
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. -- Zadie Smith
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The planet is finished with us, at this point - -- Zadie Smith
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And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day. -- Zadie Smith
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Leah watches Natalie stride over to her beautiful kitchen with her beautiful child. Everything behind those French doors is full and meaningful. The gestures, the glances, the conversations that can't be heard. How do you get to be so full? And so full of only meaningful things? -- Zadie Smith
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The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him. -- Zadie Smith
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The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics. -- Zadie Smith
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mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case. -- Zadie Smith
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There is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody -- Zadie Smith
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Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either. -- 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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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world. -- Zadie Smith
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How much longer on the divan? Why does sex have to mean everything? OK, it can mean something, but why everything? Why do thirty years have to go down the toilet because I wanted to touch somebody else? Am I missing something? Is this what it comes down to? Why does the sex have to mean everything? -- Zadie Smith
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Those who read Middlemarch in that way will find little in Their Eyes Were Watching God to please them. It's about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another. -- Zadie Smith
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Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity. -- Zadie Smith
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Nostalgia is a luxury. -- Zadie Smith
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From where I stood it was a pose that collapsed many periods in her life into one: mother and lover, big sister, best friend, superstar and diplomat, billionaire and street kid, foolish girl and woman of substance. -- Zadie Smith
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The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes. -- Zadie Smith
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I'm serious. I don't know how you work like that. My school shit is better organized, and I'm not in the business of World Domination. -- Zadie Smith
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I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it. -- Zadie Smith
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Thirty years - almost all of them really happy. That's a lifetime, it's incredible. Most people don't get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it's over... -- Zadie Smith
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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. -- Zadie Smith
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The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause. -- Zadie Smith
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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. -- Zadie Smith
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My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own. -- Zadie Smith
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Life's not a video game, Felix- there aren't a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn't actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over. -- Zadie Smith
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If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed. -- Zadie Smith
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But I was so much older then," sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, "I'm younger than that now. -- Zadie Smith
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Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her. He has always denied this. -- Zadie Smith
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This is what I understood by it: that for Astaire the person in the film was not especially connected with him. -- Zadie Smith
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It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.' -- Zadie Smith
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He'd turned to me, red-faced, and asked: 'If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany? -- Zadie Smith
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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue. -- Zadie Smith
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half. -- Zadie Smith
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We worried for her. We tend to assume the worst, here in Willesden. We watched her watching the shuttlecock. Pock, smash. Pock, smash. As if one player could imagine only a violent conclusion and the other only a hopeful return. -- Zadie Smith
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But he had underestimated the strangeness of talking about the future of his life with someone for whom the future still seemed unbounded: a pleasure palace of choices, with infinite doors, in which only a fool would spend his time trapped in one room. -- Zadie Smith
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A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end - he will kill. Make no mistake. He won't let the new order roll over him without a struggle. -- Zadie Smith
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I felt I was losing track of my physical location, rising above my body, viewing my life from a very distant point, hovering over it. -- Zadie Smith
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it's about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don't you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?" He -- Zadie Smith
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else. -- Zadie Smith
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive. -- Zadie Smith
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'this is real. This life. We're really here - this is really happening. Suffering is real. When you hurt people, it's real. When you fuck one of our best friends, that's a real thing and it hurts me. -- Zadie Smith
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[...] our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day. -- Zadie Smith
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The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation ... -- Zadie Smith
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you. -- Zadie Smith
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can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize? -- Zadie Smith
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And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. -- Zadie Smith
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Kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement. -- Zadie Smith
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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. I'm too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible. -- Zadie Smith
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I got something to tell you, said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice. -- Zadie Smith
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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living. -- Zadie Smith
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But it's hard, when you're at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others, -- Zadie Smith
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People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it. -- Zadie Smith
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still. -- Zadie Smith
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control. -- Zadie Smith
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When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark. -- Zadie Smith
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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical. -- Zadie Smith
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Don't confuse honours with achievement. -- Zadie Smith
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Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. -- Zadie Smith
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Still laughing but with the same sorrow she had felt when a hitherto perfectly nice cabbie began to tell her that all the Jews in the first tower has been warned beforehand or that you can't trust Mexicans not to steal the rug from under your feet or that more roads were built under Stalin ... -- Zadie Smith
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I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that. And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. -- Zadie Smith
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Am so angry at you right now. -- Zadie Smith
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Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don't make our own business? -- Zadie Smith
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I do my best work under pressure, so I'll nick an artery, and my husband isn't allowed to stanch the bleeding till I've banged out a chapter. -- Zadie Smith
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She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world. -- Zadie Smith
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?' -- Zadie Smith
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I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric. -- Zadie Smith
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No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed. -- Zadie Smith
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act. -- Zadie Smith
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves. -- Zadie Smith
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It was a competition in agony. Like rich women in posh restaurants ordering ever-smaller salads. -- Zadie Smith
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It seems to me," said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, "that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that. -- Zadie Smith
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But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over. -- Zadie Smith
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you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy-tale! -- Zadie Smith
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That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way. -- Zadie Smith
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I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash. -- Zadie Smith
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I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do. -- Zadie Smith
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy. -- Zadie Smith
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I felt a wonderful lightness in my body, a ridiculous happiness, it seemed to come from nowhere. -- Zadie Smith
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The shit is not the shit, the pigeon is the shit. -- Zadie Smith
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling. -- Zadie Smith
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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me. -- Zadie Smith
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Everybody's got their tribe. Whose tribe are you in anyway? -- Zadie Smith
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At any time of the day, corduroy is a highly stressful fabric. Rent collectors wear it. Tax collectors, too. History teachers add leather elbow patches. -- Zadie Smith
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I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age. -- Zadie Smith
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It's a question of what love gives you the right to do. -- Zadie Smith
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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you. -- Zadie Smith
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [ ... ] -- Zadie Smith
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Don't you think they're as bored as you are? You think you're somebody special? You think I wake up everyday so happy to see you? You're a snob, just in the other way. Do you think you are the only one who wants something else? Another life? -- Zadie Smith
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I want to stay still and to keep moving. I want this life and another. -- Zadie Smith
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I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me. -- Zadie Smith
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential. -- Zadie Smith
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this light was something else again. It buzzed and held you in its heat, it was thick, alive with pollen and insects and birds, and because nothing higher than one story interrupted its path, it gave all its gifts at once, blessing everything equally, an explosion of simultaneous illumination. "What -- Zadie Smith
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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. -- Zadie Smith
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(oh, he loves her; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly) -- Zadie Smith
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You're next. It's the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings. -- Zadie Smith
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new. -- Zadie Smith
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I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do. -- Zadie Smith
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange. -- Zadie Smith
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She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive. -- Zadie Smith
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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval. -- Zadie Smith
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All tastes are expressions of belief. -- Zadie Smith
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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying. -- Zadie Smith
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More silence; children's silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs. -- 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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as if we were both trying to get on a see-saw at the same time - neither of us pressed too hard and a delicate equilibrium was allowed to persist. -- Zadie Smith
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Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like, information ... and if it's God, you've got the wrong house. -- Zadie Smith
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That girl,' tutted Alsana as her front door slammed, 'swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time. -- Zadie Smith
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned. -- Zadie Smith
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around. -- Zadie Smith
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A feminist who had always been supported by men - first my father and now the Noted Activist - and who, though she continually harangued me about the "nobility of labor," had never, as far as I knew, actually been gainfully employed. -- 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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or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth. -- Zadie Smith
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Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one. -- Zadie Smith
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I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, "Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing - loads of Indian people." To which you want to reply, "Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing - loads of white people. -- Zadie Smith
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You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books. -- 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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The wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. -- Zadie Smith
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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts. -- Zadie Smith
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Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever. -- Zadie Smith
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A peculiar idea. Once you're alive in this world, you're responsible." "For -- Zadie Smith
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13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands.
13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable. -- Zadie Smith
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Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting. -- Zadie Smith
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Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don't, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It's not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that. -- Zadie Smith
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time. -- Zadie Smith
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Maybe nothing that happens upon stolen ground can expect a happy ending. -- Zadie Smith
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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance. -- 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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Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison. -- Zadie Smith
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free. -- Zadie Smith
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These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you - even when it isn't in your power to bestow it - and then when the real shit hits the fan, when you need them to be adults, suddenly they're children again. -- Zadie Smith
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But why think the more reasons there were to sin, the smaller the sin was? -- Zadie Smith
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Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels weren't neurotic, but could aim themselves simply and purely at transcendent feeling. -- Zadie Smith
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. -- Zadie Smith
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The nineties, ecstatic decade! -- Zadie Smith
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Grass can be seen, although it is important not to -- Zadie Smith
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with. -- 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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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself. -- Zadie Smith
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That's why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too. -- Zadie Smith
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It was a tough decision.' Mickey crosses his arms and scoffs, 'No such thing, mate. You're either right or you ain't. And -- Zadie Smith
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There are so many different ways to be poor, -- Zadie Smith
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It was the same now. Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia. -- Zadie Smith
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things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth. Our -- Zadie Smith
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The shit is *not* the shit (this was Mo's mantra,) the *pigeon* is the shit. -- Zadie Smith
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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite? -- Zadie Smith
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Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you. -- Zadie Smith
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Well, you can't make old friends. -- Zadie Smith
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Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be. -- Zadie Smith
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Sometimes I wonder if people don't want freedom as much as they want meaning. -- Zadie Smith
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... maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous ... . - Zadie Smith -- Zadie Smith
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A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor. -- Zadie Smith
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We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be. -- Zadie Smith
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She was in breach of that feminine law that states that no weakness may be shown by a woman to another woman without a sacrifice of equal value being made in return. -- Zadie Smith
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He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies. -- 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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I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury. -- Zadie Smith
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There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. -- Zadie Smith
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though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other. -- Zadie Smith
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Getting anything out of my husband is like trying to squeeze water out when you're stoned. -- Zadie Smith
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources. -- Zadie Smith
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Nobody can cast themselves out. -- Zadie Smith
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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always. -- Zadie Smith
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything. -- Zadie Smith
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We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn't feel this way? -- Zadie Smith
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The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students. -- Zadie Smith
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You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can't cross. -- Zadie Smith
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In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I'm thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I've come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it keeps you on your toes. -- Zadie Smith
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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence. -- Zadie Smith
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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold. -- Zadie Smith
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action. -- Zadie Smith
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Pulchritude
beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. -- Zadie Smith
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We are split people. -- Zadie Smith
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You are never stronger ... than when you land on the other side of despair. -- Zadie Smith
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. -- Zadie Smith
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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work. -- Zadie Smith
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be. -- Zadie Smith
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He wanted to be in the world and take what came with it, endings local and universal, full stops, periods, looks of injured disappointment and the everyday war. He liked the everyday war. He was taking that with fries. To go. -- Zadie Smith
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She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn't time for anything else. -- Zadie Smith
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She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance. -- Zadie Smith
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All day long I can look forward to a popsicle. -- Zadie Smith
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But these people _announced_ their madness ... they flaunted their insanity, they weren't half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. -- Zadie Smith
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Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew to understand this and exploit it fully. -- Zadie Smith
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Don't mask self-doubt with contempt. -- Zadie Smith
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The past is always tense, the future perfect. -- Zadie Smith
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For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood. -- Zadie Smith
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They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up. -- Zadie Smith
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People aren't poor because they make bad choices. They make bad choices because they're poor. -- Zadie Smith
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Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old. -- Zadie Smith
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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. -- Zadie Smith
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Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1 -- Zadie Smith
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Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives. -- Zadie Smith
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The whole plan's so high on the cheese factor it's practically Stilton -- Zadie Smith
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And it's time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. -- Zadie Smith
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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios:
Pebble : Beach
Raindrop : Ocean
Needle : Haystack -- Zadie Smith
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It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. -- Zadie Smith
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My rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done. -- Zadie Smith
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language. -- Zadie Smith
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I don't mean that my mother didn't love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind. The fundamental skill of all mothers - the management -- Zadie Smith
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[he] had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth -- Zadie Smith
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages. -- Zadie Smith
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Yes, sometimes it's the strangers that sustain you. -- Zadie Smith
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While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became. -- Zadie Smith
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Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. -- Zadie Smith
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself. -- Zadie Smith
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy -- Zadie Smith
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No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless." "I -- Zadie Smith
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I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction. -- Zadie Smith
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. -- Zadie Smith
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The fundamental skill of all mothers - the management of time - was beyond her. -- Zadie Smith
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Then, cutting across it all like a stick through the sand, a child's voice wailed, an acute, high-pitched sound, such as a small animal makes when, out of sheer boredom, you break its leg. -- Zadie Smith
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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out) -- Zadie Smith
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then after a few miles you arrived at a new idea, that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness - or potential for goodness - a person possessed. -- Zadie Smith
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And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared. -- Zadie Smith
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/Why do you insist on taking the scooter if you know you're not going to want to use it?'The child spoke with her wet lips brushing the flesh of her mother's ear: 'I don't know what I'm going to want until when I want it. -- Zadie Smith
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He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire, the kind of talking that only increases it. -- Zadie Smith
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Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti -- Zadie Smith
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me. -- Zadie Smith
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Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands. -- Zadie Smith
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She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something. -- Zadie Smith
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The fear was respect, the respect, fear. If you didn't have the fear you had nothing. -- Zadie Smith
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If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. -- Zadie Smith
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But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain. One -- Zadie Smith
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt
something is gained but something is lost. -- Zadie Smith
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for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him. -- Zadie Smith
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You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead. -- Zadie Smith
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They were touched by the same inheritance. -- Zadie Smith
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies. -- Zadie Smith
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Time is how you spend your love. -- Zadie Smith
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition. -- Zadie Smith
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The shit is not the shit, he repeated solemnly, the pigeon is the shit. -- Zadie Smith
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How long that song seemed - longer than life. -- Zadie Smith
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If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space. -- Zadie Smith
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Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us. -- Zadie Smith
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This was one of the little ways in which he said sorry. They were meant to add up each day. -- Zadie Smith
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Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. -- Zadie Smith
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead. -- Zadie Smith
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Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well. -- Zadie Smith
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. -- Zadie Smith
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Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting. -- Zadie Smith
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In a whisper he began begging for - and, as the sun set, received - the concession people always beg for: a little more time. -- Zadie Smith
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Beggars cannot be choosers. -- 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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They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire. -- Zadie Smith
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Fewer American flags [in Brooklyn] than in Florida but more than in San Francisco. -- Zadie Smith
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but to create a real feeling - made -- Zadie Smith
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Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. -- Zadie Smith
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Faith is hard to achieve, easy to lose. -- Zadie Smith
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls. -- Zadie Smith
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories. -- Zadie Smith
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I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy's screwy - cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad. -- Zadie Smith
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I couldn't afford to be offended. -- Zadie Smith
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love. -- Zadie Smith
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Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him. -- Zadie Smith
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format? -- Zadie Smith
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Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time. -- Zadie Smith
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The story was the price you paid for the rhythm. -- Zadie Smith
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love. -- Zadie Smith
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So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past. -- Zadie Smith
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know? -- Zadie Smith
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I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific. -- Zadie Smith
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My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions. -- Zadie Smith
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It was a kiss from the past. -- Zadie Smith
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I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to. -- Zadie Smith
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy. -- Zadie Smith
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people. -- Zadie Smith
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence. -- Zadie Smith
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It's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots. -- Zadie Smith
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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. -- Zadie Smith
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It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love. -- 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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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. -- Zadie Smith
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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion. -- Zadie Smith
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure. -- Zadie Smith
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People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it's over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there's no down time. -- Zadie Smith
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter? -- Zadie Smith
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships, Language. Sensibility. -- Zadie Smith
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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own. -- Zadie Smith
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Those are my bougainvillea - I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing. -- Zadie Smith
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I didn't understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom. -- Zadie Smith
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She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she'd ever meant by the word. -- Zadie Smith
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention. -- Zadie Smith
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We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted. -- Zadie Smith
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He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either. -- Zadie Smith
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I was fourteen: the world was pain. -- Zadie Smith
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal. -- Zadie Smith
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. -- Zadie Smith
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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page. -- Zadie Smith
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I wanted to love and to be loved. -- Zadie Smith
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'? -- Zadie Smith
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Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns. -- Zadie Smith
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There is a connection between boredom and the desire for chaos. Despite many disguises and bluffs perhaps she had never stopped wanting chaos. -- Zadie Smith
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for. -- 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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To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated. -- Zadie Smith
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He's one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is 'noble'. Howard didn't much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers. -- Zadie Smith
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Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people. -- Zadie Smith
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The Noted Activist -- Zadie Smith
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Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable. -- Zadie Smith
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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else. -- 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
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story. -- Zadie Smith
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Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money. -- Zadie Smith
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Magical thinking makes you crazy - and renders everything possible. -- Zadie Smith
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool. -- Zadie Smith
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution. -- Zadie Smith
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Once they were the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her of the numbers, in case she forgets. -- Zadie Smith
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world. -- Zadie Smith
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And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass. -- Zadie Smith
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There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route. -- Zadie Smith
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That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise. -- Zadie Smith
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There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with. -- Zadie Smith
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The future's another country, man ... And I still ain't got a passport. -- 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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When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. -- Zadie Smith
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express. -- Zadie Smith
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more. -- Zadie Smith
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed. -- Zadie Smith
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Subtle people. Two steps ahead. -- Zadie Smith
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but that coldness stopped up the sentence in my mouth. "What -- Zadie Smith
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One of the advantages of loving women, of being loved by women: they will always do things far beyond the call of duty -- Zadie Smith
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It hurts just as much as it is worth. -- Zadie Smith
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A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal. -- Zadie Smith
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Ryan is indispensable. There -- Zadie Smith
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I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing. -- Zadie Smith
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A different kind of history from my mother's, the kind that is barely written down - that is felt. -- Zadie Smith
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One of the many things TV does not show you is the potential range and horror of the human form. For this alone, thought Alex, it is rightly celebrated. -- Zadie Smith