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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Catching
Bus
Thirty
Consider
Failure
Anyone
Age

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It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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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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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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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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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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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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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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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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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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