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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?

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Doesn
Work
Would
Jerome
Like
Miserable
Anymore
Alone
Family
Everyone

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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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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 object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.
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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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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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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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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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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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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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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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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
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I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.
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