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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
Lost
Occasionally
Power
Literary
Aphorisms
Give
Watching
Keats
Ideas
Battle
Concede
Many
Eyes
Aphorism
Giving
Eye
Lyrical
Read
Battles
Idea
Monopoly

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
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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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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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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.
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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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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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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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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
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We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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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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