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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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Home
Attracted
Ideas
Length
Time
Particularly
Exactly
Serious
Literature
Nabokov
Idea
Inconceivable
Away
Exile

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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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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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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Time is how you spend your love.
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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
Zadie Smith
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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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.
Zadie Smith