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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
Character
Everything
Friendships
Shrinks
Sensibility
Language
Individual

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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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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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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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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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
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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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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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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.
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You're a library of me.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
Zadie Smith
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Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
Zadie Smith
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
Zadie Smith