A Quote by Zadie Smith

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

Zadie Smith

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Any Attracted Away Away From Home Because Being Exactly Exile Home Idea Inconceivable Length Literature Me Particularly Serious Time Very

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Zadie Smith
British - Novelist
Born: October 25, 1975

I kind of shy away from that idea of being an actress because it seems to me to be such a cliché. Also, if you want to be a serious actress, then it's quite difficult to make that transition without being the blond bimbo in the opening credits. Maybe I'm being idealistic about acting and the idea that they would hire people purely based on their talent and not on their looks. But I don't know if I would be a very talented actress anyway.

Edie Campbell

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

Roberto Bolano

exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

Edward Said

I am a black person. I come out of an experience of exile and migration. I have always felt myself to be at once at home and away from home at the same time. It is inevitable that my perspective will be international.

Kwame Dawes

The idea of me being an icon or something is a very funny thing, just because of my own weird insecurities. But, yeah... probably because I toiled away being nothing for so long.

JPEGMAFIA

Right away when I got to college, I realized that being a politician sucks. It's really hard! It wasn't for me. B.J. Novak is convinced that I will run for mayor of Chicago at some point. He begs me to do it. It'd be a tough gig, but I was always very attracted to the idea of helping people and trying to make the city a better place.

Ike Barinholtz

I have this romanticized idea of dance music in the '90s because, obviously, I was way too young to be a part of it. So I have this rose-tinted idea of it. I have this idea of it being a very special time. But I still don't know that much - I can never remember any names of seminal artists.

Jamie xx

I don't like being away from home. That's one reason why I don't work as much as I used to [when I started my career], because so many things are on the road. I just don't want to be away from my husband, my dogs and my home. I don't sing that much any more because that also takes you on the road.

Jane Powell

Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of controversy, was an author who never gave up.

Ashwin Sanghi

I was a sickly baby, and after two sets of adoptive parents took me home, they returned me to the orphanage because of a serious respiratory infection. But as they say, the third time's a charm, because my mom and dad adopted me and took me into their home where I was raised in a family full of love.

Rodney Atkins

I found that life for me gets a lot more serious as you get older. You start off young and happy and smiling and "Wooo! I'm having fun!" And then you get married, and that's very serious, and you have kids, and that's very, very serious. So as you get older, you start thinking about passing away, and that becomes extremely serious.

Drew Magary

They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom

Khalil Gibran

I'm Jewish. That's all. So I am in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.

Chantal Akerman

What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.

Martin Amis

I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

Martin Amis

Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else - in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.

Robert Hass

A Quote by Zadie Smith

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