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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
Always
Child
Doesn
Didn
Beauvoir
Might
Sartre
Come
Jean
Children
Remind
Something
Paul
Believe
Easier

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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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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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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
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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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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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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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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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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.
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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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I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
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