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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.

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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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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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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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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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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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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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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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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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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