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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Else
Unstoppable
Much
Directed
Like
Quantity
Produced
Narrative
Fate
Somebody
Written

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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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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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For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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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.
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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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Time is how you spend your love.
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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.
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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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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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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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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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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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