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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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Books
Carol
Read
Carols
Change
Historically
Book
Bourgeois
Way
Extreme
Extremes
Christmas
Comfort

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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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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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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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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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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 had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
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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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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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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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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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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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