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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
Survived
Sentence
Sentences
Friendship
Difficult
Order
Must
Every

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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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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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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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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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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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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.
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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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