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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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I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
Zadie Smith
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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
Zadie Smith
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
Zadie Smith
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
Zadie Smith
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
Zadie Smith
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
Zadie Smith
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
Zadie Smith
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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
Zadie Smith
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith