Quote

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?

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Still
Corner
Like
Corners
Penthouse
Despite
Penthouses
Somehow
Suite
Artists
Occupying
Artist
Fictional
Reality
Insist
Stills
Rapper

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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
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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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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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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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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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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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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
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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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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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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 fundamental
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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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