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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Essential
Essentials
Absolutely
Went
Place
Find
Library

More quotes by 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.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
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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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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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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.
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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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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie Smith
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
Zadie Smith
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
Zadie Smith
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For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
Zadie Smith
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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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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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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
Zadie Smith