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It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Comfort
Books
Carol
Read
Carols
Change
Historically
Book
Bourgeois
Way
Extreme
Extremes
Christmas

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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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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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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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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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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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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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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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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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
Zadie Smith
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You're a library of me.
Zadie Smith
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
Zadie Smith
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I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
Zadie Smith