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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
Thinking
Deeply
Essential
Essentials
Freedom
Part
Power
Think

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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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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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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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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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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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Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.
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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
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Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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