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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: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Oneself
Faith
Lost
Something
Ridding
Like
Retrieve
Boiling
Gained
Salt

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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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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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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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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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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 wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
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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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