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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Faith
Lost
Something
Ridding
Like
Retrieve
Boiling
Gained
Salt
Oneself

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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 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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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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You're a library of me.
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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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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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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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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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
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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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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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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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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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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?
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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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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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