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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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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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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 lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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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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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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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'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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I know a lot of people who read and think: George [Saunders] is so much fun. There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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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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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
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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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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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... 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.
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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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.
Zadie Smith
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
Zadie Smith