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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Divorce
Taking
Longer
Things
Love
People

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The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
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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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And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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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'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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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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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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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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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
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I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
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I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.
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The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.
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The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
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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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(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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