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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Accessory
Accessories
Object
Objects
Passion

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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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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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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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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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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
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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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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.
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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
Zadie Smith