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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Live
Must
Actions
Life
Consequence
Remain
Creatures
Full
Knowledge
Action

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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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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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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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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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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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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
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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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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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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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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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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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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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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
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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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