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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Attention
Novels
Kind
Absolutes
Absolute
Details
Perception
Allow
Usually
Novel
Detail

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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
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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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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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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?
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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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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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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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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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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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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.
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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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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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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