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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Selfish
Lived
Really
Love

More quotes by 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.
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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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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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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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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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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.
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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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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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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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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.
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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Zadie Smith
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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
Zadie Smith