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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: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Political
Certain
Profess
Thing
Conservatism
Really
Positions
People
Liberalism
Position
Least
Interesting

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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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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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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.
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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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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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