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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: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Always
Spread
Would
Lying
Like
Future
Tense
Perfect
Tall
Black
Surely
Tell
Wicked
Others
Tales
Past
Myth
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
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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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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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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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