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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Genealogy
Traced
Feeling
Feelings

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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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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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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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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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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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
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It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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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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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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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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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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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.
Zadie Smith
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
Zadie Smith