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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Genius
Novel
Idea
Individual
Ideas
Always
Curation
Never
Bought
Forth

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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 library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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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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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
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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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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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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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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
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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.
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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
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