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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
Reality
Delusion
Around
Desires
Live
Ambition
Come
Aspect
Something
Personality
Unless
Desire
Sociopathic
Strong
Shaped

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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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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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
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Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
Zadie Smith
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I know a lot of people who read and think: George [Saunders] is so much fun. There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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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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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
Zadie Smith
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The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
Zadie Smith
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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
Zadie Smith
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
Zadie Smith
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
Zadie Smith
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
Zadie Smith
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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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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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Zadie Smith
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith