Quote

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Seems
Paper
Nowhere
Human
Move
Ethical
Humans
Talk
Consequences
Time
Help
Ethics
Interpretive
People
Moving
Exists
Unfold
Helping
Actions
Realm
Action
Consequence
Multiple
Cannot
Possibility
Realms

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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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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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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
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People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
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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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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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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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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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