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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Prison
Watching
Read
Wish
Time
Think
Secretly
Thinking
Documentary
People
Documentaries

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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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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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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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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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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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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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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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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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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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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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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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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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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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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
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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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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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