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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Mind
Bits
Really
Public
Unreal
Life
Idea
Involves
Like
Two
Tolerate
People
Cannot
Aspects
Used
Aspect
Ideas
Minds
Live
Somebody

More quotes by 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'?
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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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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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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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.
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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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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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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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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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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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I know a lot of people who read and think: George [Saunders] is so much fun. There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
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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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