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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Like
Myth
Unicorn
Fantasy
Tangled
Lies
Myths
Fiction
Homeland
Lying
Magical
Words
Infinity
Language
Imagined
Soul
Passed
Webs

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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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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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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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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
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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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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 am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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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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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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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 last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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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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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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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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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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