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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
Past
Truth
Solution
Solutions
Ends

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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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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.
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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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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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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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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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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
Zadie Smith