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I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Didn
Beauvoir
Might
Sartre
Come
Jean
Children
Remind
Something
Paul
Believe
Easier
Always
Child
Doesn

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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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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
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For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
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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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It was a kiss from the past.
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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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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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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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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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