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

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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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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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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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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 end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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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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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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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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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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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.
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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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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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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
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For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
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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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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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