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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: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Catching
Bus
Thirty
Consider
Failure
Anyone
Age

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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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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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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.
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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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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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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
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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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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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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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And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
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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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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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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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