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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Perfect
Tall
Black
Surely
Tell
Wicked
Others
Tales
Past
Myth
Always
Spread
Would
Lying
Like
Future
Tense

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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
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Time is how you spend your love.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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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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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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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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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.
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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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.
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The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
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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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