Quote

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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Look
Liberal
Self
Careful
Networked
Looks
Consider
Disgust
Turn
Bourgeois
Turns
Selves
Free
Owned
Wish
Reminds
Sense
Disgusting

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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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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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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
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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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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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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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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
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You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
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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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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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