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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Mean
Illegal
Feel
Feels

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
Zadie Smith
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
Zadie Smith
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
Zadie Smith
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Zadie Smith
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
Zadie Smith
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
Zadie Smith
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
Zadie Smith
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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.
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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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
Zadie Smith
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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
Zadie Smith
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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
Zadie Smith
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I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.
Zadie Smith
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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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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.
Zadie Smith
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And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
Zadie Smith
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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
Zadie Smith
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
Zadie Smith