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: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Weak
Desperation
Protect
Fence
Need
Vulnerability
Needs
Ring
Something
Empathy
Always
Rings
Things
Weakness
Stronger
Exploited

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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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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?
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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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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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I know a lot of people who read and think: George [Saunders] is so much fun. There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
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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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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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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.
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