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'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
Desires
Ambition
Desire
Reality
Around
Something
Sociopathic
Shaped

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I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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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?
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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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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
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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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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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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 secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.
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