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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Selfish
Lived
Really
Love

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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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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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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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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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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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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
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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.
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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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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
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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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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
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