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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Least
Signify
Beauty
Infection
Word
Suspect
Would
Suspects
Like
Hidden
Skin
Skins
Looked
Belch

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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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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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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.
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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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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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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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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