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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Intimate
Begins
Either
Difficult
Tell
Truth
Banal
Book
Presented
People
Wholly

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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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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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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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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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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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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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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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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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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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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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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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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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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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It was a kiss from the past.
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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 seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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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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