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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: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Something
Personality
Unless
Desire
Sociopathic
Strong
Shaped
Reality
Delusion
Around
Desires
Live
Ambition
Come
Aspect

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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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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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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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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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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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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
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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.
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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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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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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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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