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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Alternatives
Illegal
Lack
Action
Doe

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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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.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
Zadie Smith
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
Zadie Smith
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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.
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.
Zadie Smith
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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
Zadie Smith
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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
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Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
Zadie Smith
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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.
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 was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
Zadie Smith
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Time is how you spend your love.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith