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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Holding
Ideal
Ideals
Meant
Reader
Writer
Sleep
Cannot

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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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.
Zadie Smith
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
Zadie Smith
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
Zadie Smith
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The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
Zadie Smith
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
Zadie Smith
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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
Zadie Smith
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
Zadie Smith
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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
Zadie Smith
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
Zadie Smith
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
Zadie Smith
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Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
Zadie Smith
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
Zadie Smith