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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Live
Ambition
Come
Aspect
Something
Personality
Unless
Desire
Sociopathic
Strong
Shaped
Reality
Delusion
Around
Desires

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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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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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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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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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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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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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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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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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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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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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
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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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