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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
Good
Ghosts
Grown
Ghost
Taste
Novel
Talking

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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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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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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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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
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Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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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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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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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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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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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 often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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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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