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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?
Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Looks
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Life
Moment
Doesn
Moments
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Littles
Suddenly
Back
Ridiculous
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Wall
More quotes by Zadie Smith
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
Zadie Smith
Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
Zadie Smith
It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
Zadie Smith
And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
Zadie Smith
It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
Zadie Smith
I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
Zadie Smith
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Zadie Smith
Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
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
'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
Zadie Smith
She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
Zadie Smith
It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
Zadie Smith
