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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
Shaped
Desires
Ambition
Desire
Reality
Around
Something
Sociopathic

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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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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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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.
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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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 secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
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Time is how you spend your love.
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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
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When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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