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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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Thinking
Structure
Deep
Simply
Family
Childish
Might
Structures
Something
Split
Really
Splits
Always
Opposites

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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
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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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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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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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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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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
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I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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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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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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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.
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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
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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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