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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Energy
World
Misplaced
Cruelty

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The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
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For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamental
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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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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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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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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13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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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 such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
Zadie Smith
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
Zadie Smith
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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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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Zadie Smith
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
Zadie Smith