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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Difference
Differences
State
Understand
Also
States
Sameness
Equality

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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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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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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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.
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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
Zadie Smith
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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
Zadie Smith
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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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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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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
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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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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
Zadie Smith
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Zadie Smith