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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
Love
Either
Genetics
Impossible
Accidents
Experience
Necessarily
Part
Active
Find
Shame
Human
Female
Humans
Pride
Even
Proud
More quotes by Zadie Smith
Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
Zadie Smith
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
Zadie Smith
Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
Zadie Smith
He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
Zadie Smith
Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
Zadie Smith
The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
Zadie Smith
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Zadie Smith
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
Zadie Smith
For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
Zadie Smith
Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
Zadie Smith
It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
Zadie Smith
One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
Zadie Smith
Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie Smith
He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith
