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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
Every
Survived
Sentence
Sentences
Friendship
Difficult
Order
Must

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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
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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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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.
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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Time is how you spend your love.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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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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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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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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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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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.
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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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