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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
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London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Making
Sometimes
Life
Illusion
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More quotes by Zadie Smith
The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
Zadie Smith
Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
Zadie Smith
The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
Zadie Smith
All tastes are expressions of belief.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
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
To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
Zadie Smith
Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
Zadie Smith
Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
Zadie Smith
For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
Zadie Smith
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'?
Zadie Smith
Full stories are as rare as honesty.
Zadie Smith
I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
Zadie Smith
The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
Zadie Smith
And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
Zadie Smith
A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
Zadie Smith
As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
Zadie Smith
I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
Zadie Smith
When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
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
