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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
Wish
Time
Think
Secretly
Thinking
Documentary
People
Documentaries
Prison
Watching
Read

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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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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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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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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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Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
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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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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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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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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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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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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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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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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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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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