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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
Human
Scale
Humans
Error
Scales
Politicians
Errors
Aligns
Politician
Geopolitical
Making
Category
Artist
Categories

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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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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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
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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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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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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
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Time is how you spend your love.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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