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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
Sameness
Equality
Difference
Differences
State
Understand
Also
States

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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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.
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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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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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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.
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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
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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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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
Zadie Smith
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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