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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Ends
Past
Truth
Solution
Solutions

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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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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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.
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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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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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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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.
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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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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
Zadie Smith