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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
Imprecise
Impractical
Final
Finals
Desire
Never

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
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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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Zadie Smith
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
Zadie Smith
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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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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
Zadie Smith
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
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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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
Zadie Smith
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
Zadie Smith
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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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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.
Zadie Smith
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
Zadie Smith
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
Zadie Smith
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
Zadie Smith
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
Zadie Smith
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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
Zadie Smith