Quote

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
Life
Idea
Involves
Like
Two
Tolerate
People
Cannot
Aspects
Used
Aspect
Ideas
Minds
Live
Somebody
Mind
Bits
Really
Public
Unreal

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.
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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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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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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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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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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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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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I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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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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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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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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