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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Console
Myth
Western
Art
Make

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
Zadie Smith
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You're a library of me.
Zadie Smith
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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
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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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
Zadie Smith
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Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
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.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
Zadie Smith
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie Smith
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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.
Zadie Smith
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
Zadie Smith
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And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
Zadie Smith
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
Zadie Smith
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
Zadie Smith
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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