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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
Sociopathic
Shaped
Desires
Ambition
Desire
Reality
Around
Something

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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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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
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Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
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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.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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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 you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
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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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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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