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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

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People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.
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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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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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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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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
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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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Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
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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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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
Zadie Smith