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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Cannot
Also
Must
Something
Solely
Love
Ignored
Worthy
Attention

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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
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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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I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
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The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
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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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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.
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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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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
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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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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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