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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Absurd
Somehow
Threat
Creativity
Idea
Ideas
Inherently
Motherhood

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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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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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Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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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?
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I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
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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.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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