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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
People
Thoughts
Dark
Often
Also
Women
Need
Portray
Great
Pleasing
Needs
Sympathetic

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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.
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Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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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.
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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.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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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.
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