"For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost."
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Quote collection
Zadie Smith quotes (page 8 of 12)
226 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Each couple is its own vaudeville act."
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"Full stories are as rare as honesty."
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"The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action."
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"It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy"
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"And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared."
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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."
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"Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources."
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"It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange."
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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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"Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase "at the end of the day"--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals."
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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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"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 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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"(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)"
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"The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him."
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"The nineties, ecstatic decade!"
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"Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands."
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"I know a lot of people who read and think: "George [Saunders] is so much fun." There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist."
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"I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame."
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