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I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Find
Shame
Human
Female
Humans
Pride
Even
Proud
Love
Either
Genetics
Impossible
Accidents
Experience
Necessarily
Part
Active

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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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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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.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
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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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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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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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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
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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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(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.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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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.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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