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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Think
Thinking
Deeply
Essential
Essentials
Freedom
Part
Power

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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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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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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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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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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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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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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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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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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
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For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
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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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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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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
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