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If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Book
Writing
Going
Make
Good
Cautious
Time
Mistakes
Mistake
Write

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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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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 roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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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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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.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
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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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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
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Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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