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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Different
Histories
Every
Twice
Life
Outside
Inside
Moment
Moments
Happens
Two

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
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People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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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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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.
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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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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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You're a library of me.
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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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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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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
Zadie Smith
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
Zadie Smith
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
Zadie Smith
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
Zadie Smith