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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Writing
Structures
Subconscious
Structure
Childhood
Deep
Often
Seems

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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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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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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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To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
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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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Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
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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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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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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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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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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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