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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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Really
Tries
Never
Hopeless
Complexity
English
Upstart
Subject
Specious
Subjects
Bulk
Nature
Jargon
Trying
Imitate

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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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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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And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
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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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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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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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