Quote

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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
World
Little
Suppose
Wells
Dying
Well
Boys
Feel
Natural
Abraham
Feels
Pain
Lincoln
Way
Another
Tendency
Things
Problem
Tendencies
Like
Littles
Beloved

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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
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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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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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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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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.
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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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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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