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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Ghosts
Grown
Ghost
Taste
Novel
Talking
Good

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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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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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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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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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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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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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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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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.
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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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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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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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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
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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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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
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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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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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