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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Else
Confirmation
Ever
Fell
Firsts
Consider
Everything
Evidence
First
Loved
Would
Lasts
Love
Last
Away

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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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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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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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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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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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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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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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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 a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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