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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Reason
Nowadays
Feel
Connection
Feels
Connections
Make
Consciousness
Alone
Less
Read
True

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It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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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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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
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I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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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.
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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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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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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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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 very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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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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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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