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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Public
Funny
Thing
Like
Microphone
Microphones
Confession
Rap
Strange

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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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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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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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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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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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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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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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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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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
Zadie Smith
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
Zadie Smith