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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Duty
Nobody
Everybody
Rights
Point
Duties
Gotten
Concerned

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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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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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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
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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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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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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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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
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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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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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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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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
Zadie Smith
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What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.
Zadie Smith