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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Humans
Error
Scales
Politicians
Errors
Aligns
Politician
Geopolitical
Making
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Artist
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Human
Scale
More quotes by Zadie Smith
It was a kiss from the past.
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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 recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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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 tastes are expressions of belief.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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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.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
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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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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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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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