Quote

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
Things
Weakness
Stronger
Exploited
Weak
Desperation
Protect
Fence
Need
Vulnerability
Needs
Ring
Something
Empathy
Always
Rings

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
Zadie Smith
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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.
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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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
Zadie Smith
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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
Zadie Smith
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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Zadie Smith
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
Zadie Smith
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Zadie Smith
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
Zadie Smith
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I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
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.
Zadie Smith
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
Zadie Smith
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
Zadie Smith
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamental
Zadie Smith
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith