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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
Taking
Longer
Things
Love
People
Divorce

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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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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
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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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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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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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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.
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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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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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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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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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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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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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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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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamental
Zadie Smith