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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Novel
Never
Gotten
Leads
Otherwise
Places

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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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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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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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
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Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
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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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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
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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.
Zadie Smith
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
Zadie Smith
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
Zadie Smith
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
Zadie Smith