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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
Tell
Wicked
Others
Tales
Past
Myth
Always
Spread
Would
Lying
Like
Future
Tense
Perfect
Tall
Black
Surely

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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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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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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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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 ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
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Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.
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