Quote

When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Two
Organs
Men
Stands
Male
Males
Third
Thirds
Religion
Erect
Away
Organ

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
Zadie Smith
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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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I know a lot of people who read and think: George [Saunders] is so much fun. There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
Zadie Smith
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
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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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It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
Zadie Smith
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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.
Zadie Smith
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
Zadie Smith
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
Zadie Smith
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I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
Zadie Smith
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
Zadie Smith
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
Zadie Smith