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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: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Doesn
Moments
Format
Littles
Suddenly
Back
Ridiculous
Look
Step
Little
Wall
Looks
Steps
Life
Moment

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Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.
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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.
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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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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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
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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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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
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