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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
Everything
Lubricant
Make
Fashionable
Join
Schools
Sure
Read
Thought
School

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamental
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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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.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
Zadie Smith
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
Zadie Smith
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith
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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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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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.
Zadie Smith
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
Zadie Smith
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
Zadie Smith
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
Zadie Smith
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
Zadie Smith