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

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
Zadie Smith
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Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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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.
Zadie Smith
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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
Zadie Smith
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
Zadie Smith
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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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.
Zadie Smith
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
Zadie Smith
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
Zadie Smith
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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
Zadie Smith
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
Zadie Smith
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
Zadie Smith