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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
Persons
Intensely
Person
Naive
Novelists
Insight
Despite
Socio
Recognize
Pretensions
Deep
Pretension
Political
Frequent

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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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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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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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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.
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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.
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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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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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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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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