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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Cutting
Novel
Neural
Brain
Routes
Lying
Novels
Future
Convince
True
Attempt
Road
Lies

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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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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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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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Time is how you spend your love.
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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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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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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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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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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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