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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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Giving
Ride
Like
Books
Feeling
Easy
Sense
Feelings
Give
Implicated
Book
Discomfort

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
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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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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamental
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
Zadie Smith