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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
Needs
Sympathetic
People
Thoughts
Dark
Often
Also
Women
Need
Portray
Great
Pleasing

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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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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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.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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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.
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
Zadie Smith
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
Zadie Smith
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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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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie Smith
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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.
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.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
Zadie Smith