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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
Equality
Difference
Differences
State
Understand
Also
States
Sameness

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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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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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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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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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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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.
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I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.
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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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It was a kiss from the past.
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.
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Time is how you spend your love.
Zadie Smith
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
Zadie Smith
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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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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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im 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 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