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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Fiction
Loved
Changed
Growing
Something
Life
Trajectory
English

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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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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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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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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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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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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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
Zadie Smith
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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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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
Zadie Smith
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
Zadie Smith
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
Zadie Smith
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith