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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
People
Liberalism
Position
Least
Interesting
Political
Certain
Profess
Thing
Conservatism
Really
Positions

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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.
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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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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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
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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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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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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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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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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
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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.
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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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