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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Impractical
Final
Finals
Desire
Never
Imprecise

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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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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.
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What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.
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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
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Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamental
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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.
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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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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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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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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
Zadie Smith
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
Zadie Smith
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
Zadie Smith
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
Zadie Smith
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Zadie Smith