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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
Age
Woman
Living
Experience
Children
Work
Unadorned
Marks
Mark

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Time is how you spend your love.
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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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 never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
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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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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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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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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
Zadie Smith
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
Zadie Smith
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith