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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.
Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Always
Rings
Things
Weakness
Stronger
Exploited
Weak
Desperation
Protect
Fence
Need
Vulnerability
Needs
Ring
Something
Empathy
More quotes by Zadie Smith
I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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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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Time is how you spend your love.
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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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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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
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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 has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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