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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
Past
Always
Tense
Classic
Future
Perfect

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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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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.
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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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It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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Time is how you spend your love.
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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
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