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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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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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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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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
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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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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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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.
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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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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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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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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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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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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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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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