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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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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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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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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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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
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I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
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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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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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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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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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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
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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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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
Zadie Smith