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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
Make
Console
Myth
Western
Art

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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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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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
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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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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
Zadie Smith
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The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.
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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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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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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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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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
Zadie Smith
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
Zadie Smith