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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Punishes
Allah
Turn
Wise
Turns
Sometimes
Men

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
Zadie Smith
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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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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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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
Zadie Smith
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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
Zadie Smith
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
Zadie Smith
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
Zadie Smith
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
Zadie Smith
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
Zadie Smith
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
Zadie Smith
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
Zadie Smith
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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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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
Zadie Smith
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Zadie Smith
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I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Zadie Smith
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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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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.
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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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.
Zadie Smith