Quote

I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Read
Battles
Idea
Monopoly
Lost
Occasionally
Power
Literary
Aphorisms
Give
Watching
Keats
Ideas
Battle
Concede
Many
Eyes
Aphorism
Giving
Eye
Lyrical

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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.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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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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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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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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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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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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