Quote

Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Enjoy
Asking
Understands
Listing
Culture
Terms
Rapper
Boasting
Stuff
Succeed
Attributes
Rappers
Form
Conditions
Formal
Milton
Nothing
Taught
Heavenly
Armies
Always
Forever
Condition
Rightly
Like
Term
Army
Boast
Talk
Deserve
Epic

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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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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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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The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
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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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It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
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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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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.
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We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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