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The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Tense
Classic
Future
Perfect
Past
Always

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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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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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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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 do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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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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It was a kiss from the past.
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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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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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
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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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