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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
Structures
Subconscious
Structure
Childhood
Deep
Often
Seems
Writing

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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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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamental
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Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
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13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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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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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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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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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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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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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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Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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You're a library of me.
Zadie Smith