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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Persons
Intensely
Person
Naive
Novelists
Insight
Despite
Socio
Recognize
Pretensions
Deep
Pretension
Political
Frequent

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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
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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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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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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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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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