Quote

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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Faith
Resolve
Believe
Sand
People
Circles
Draw
Draws
Agree
Settle
Stand
Circle
Takes
Settling

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
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We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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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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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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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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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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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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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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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
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