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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Live
Somebody
Mind
Bits
Really
Public
Unreal
Life
Idea
Involves
Like
Two
Tolerate
People
Cannot
Aspects
Used
Aspect
Ideas
Minds

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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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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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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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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
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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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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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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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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
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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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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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The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
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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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I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
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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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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
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