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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Read
Thought
School
Everything
Lubricant
Make
Fashionable
Join
Schools
Sure

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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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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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
Zadie Smith
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
Zadie Smith
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
Zadie Smith
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
Zadie Smith
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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
Zadie Smith