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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Action
Consequence
Multiple
Cannot
Possibility
Realms
Seems
Paper
Nowhere
Human
Move
Ethical
Humans
Talk
Consequences
Time
Help
Ethics
Interpretive
People
Moving
Exists
Unfold
Helping
Actions
Realm

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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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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.
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What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.
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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.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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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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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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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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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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