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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Book
Indian
Thee
Roots
Concerned
Books
Lasts
Mutiny
Last
Catalogue
Find
Catalogues

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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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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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
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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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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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.
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
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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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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.
Zadie Smith
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
Zadie Smith
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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
Zadie Smith
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
Zadie Smith
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
Zadie Smith