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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
Love
Solely
Ignored
Worthy
Attention
Cannot
Also
Must
Something

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.
Zadie Smith
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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
Zadie Smith
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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
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Time is how you spend your love.
Zadie Smith
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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
Zadie Smith
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie Smith
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
Zadie Smith
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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
Zadie Smith
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
Zadie Smith
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
Zadie Smith
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
Zadie Smith
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
Zadie Smith
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith