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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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Work
Unadorned
Marks
Mark
Age
Woman
Living
Experience
Children

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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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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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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
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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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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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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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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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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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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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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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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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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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