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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Passport
Passports
Future
Another
Stills
Still
Country
Men

More quotes by 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.
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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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.
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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.
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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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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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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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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
Zadie Smith
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
Zadie Smith
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
Zadie Smith
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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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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
Zadie Smith