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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Favourites
Allies
Among
Children

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
Zadie Smith
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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Zadie Smith
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
Zadie Smith
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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?
Zadie Smith
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
Zadie Smith
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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
Zadie Smith
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
Zadie Smith
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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
Zadie Smith
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Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamental
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
Zadie Smith
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
Zadie Smith
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
Zadie Smith
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
Zadie Smith
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I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
Zadie Smith
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Zadie Smith
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
Zadie Smith