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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Way
Eliminating
Headed
Thereby
Expressing
Various
Ways
Wrong
Writing

More quotes by 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.
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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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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
Zadie Smith
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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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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.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
Zadie Smith
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
Zadie Smith
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
Zadie Smith
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
Zadie Smith
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
Zadie Smith
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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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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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