Tag: Zadie Smith
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you’re made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.
Zadie Smith
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
Zadie Smith
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That’s the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain – they cannot be otherwise.
Zadie Smith
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I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don’t know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don’t have the guts to admit that I do.
Zadie Smith
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My life is black and white and mixed. My mother’s a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy – it’s not an affectation. It’s also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.
Zadie Smith
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It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is ‘faith.’
Zadie Smith
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I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
Zadie Smith
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One thing you can’t intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the ‘search for identity’, and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.
Zadie Smith