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

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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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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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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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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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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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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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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
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We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
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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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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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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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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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