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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Misplaced
Cruelty
Energy
World

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I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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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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No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
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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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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
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I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
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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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It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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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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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
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