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" Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite? "
Zadie Smith
Corner
He
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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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" As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue. "
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" People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. "
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" I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to. "
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" That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise. "
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" Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel. "
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" I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do. "
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" There is a kind of desperate need for somebody to tell everyone what to do, which I find really peculiar in America. And then when you tell them, they're not interested, because it's also a country where everybody's opinion is their opinion, and they really don't give a damn what you think. So it's a very odd experience. "
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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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" Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don't, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It's not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that. "
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" It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. "
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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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" 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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" 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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" Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever. "
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" I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame. "
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" There's constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way. "
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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 like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction. "
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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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" One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search. "
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" I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab. "
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" We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. "
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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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" In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I'm thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I've come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it keeps you on your toes. "
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" I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical. "
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" The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper. "
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" You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. "
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" If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space. "
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" Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. "
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