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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Never
World
Fictional
Writes
Sex
Writer
Writing

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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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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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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
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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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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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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.
Zadie Smith