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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Ideas
Personhood
Inaccurate
Nostalgic
Irrational
Worry
Idea
Often

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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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... 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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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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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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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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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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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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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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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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