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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Sentence
Sentences
Friendship
Difficult
Order
Must
Every
Survived

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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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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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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
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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.
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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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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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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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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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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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