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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
Away
Exile
Home
Attracted
Ideas
Length
Time
Particularly
Exactly
Serious
Literature
Nabokov
Idea
Inconceivable

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The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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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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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
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The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
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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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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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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
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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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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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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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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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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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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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