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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Like
Changed
Unrecognizable
Ability
Removing
Society
Retain
Family
Beard
Past
Fake
Women
Generally
Back
Ancient
Unhook
Men
Leave
Discreetly

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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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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.
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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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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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The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
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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.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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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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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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