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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Political
Frequent
Persons
Intensely
Person
Naive
Novelists
Insight
Despite
Socio
Recognize
Pretensions
Deep
Pretension

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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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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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
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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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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
Zadie Smith
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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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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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
Zadie Smith
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
Zadie Smith
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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
Zadie Smith
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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
Zadie Smith
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
Zadie Smith
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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
Zadie Smith
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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
Zadie Smith
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
Zadie Smith
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
Zadie Smith
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
Zadie Smith
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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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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
Zadie Smith
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
Zadie Smith