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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Individual
Character
Everything
Friendships
Shrinks
Sensibility
Language

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
Zadie Smith
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
Zadie Smith
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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
Zadie Smith
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I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.
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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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
Zadie Smith
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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.
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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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
Zadie Smith
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
Zadie Smith
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
Zadie Smith
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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
Zadie Smith
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie Smith
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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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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
Zadie Smith