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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
Humans
Pride
Even
Proud
Love
Either
Genetics
Impossible
Accidents
Experience
Necessarily
Part
Active
Find
Shame
Human
Female

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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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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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.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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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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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
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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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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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Time is how you spend your love.
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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
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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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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.
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It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
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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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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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.
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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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