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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
Thinking
Documentary
People
Documentaries
Prison
Watching
Read
Wish
Time
Think
Secretly

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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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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.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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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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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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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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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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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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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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