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Quote by Zadie Smith

“I, along with generations of women readers, have wondered: How could a man know so much of us? But the mystery is not so mysterious. Husbands know a great deal about wives, after all, and wives about husbands. Lovers know each other. Brothers know a lot about sisters and vice versa. Muslims and Christians and Jews know one another, or think they do. Our social and personal lives are a process of continual fictionalization, as we internalize the other-we-are-not, dramatize them, imagine them, speak for them and through them. The accuracy of this fictionalization is never guaranteed, but without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all. One of the things fiction did is make this process explicit—visible. All storytelling is the invitation to enter a parallel space, a hypothetical arena, in which you have imagined access to whatever is not you. And if fiction had a belief about itself, it was that fiction had empathy in its DNA, that it was the product of compassion.”

Quote by Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is a British novelist known for her distinctive literary style and profound social insights. Her works cover a range of themes including race, class, gender, and identity, and have been widely appreciated by readers. more

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