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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Wells
Streets
Well
Pleasure
Feel
Suffering
Feels
Happy
Really
Pain
Thinking
Order
Someone
Skip
Used
Street

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.
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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
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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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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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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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What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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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 ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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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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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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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.
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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.
Zadie Smith
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
Zadie Smith
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
Zadie Smith