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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Kind
Therapy
Never
Opposites
Thinking
Horror
Life
Groups
People
Support
Creative
Attended
Class
Therapeutic
Writing
Moonlight

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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.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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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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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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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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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
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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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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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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.
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