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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. "
Zadie Smith
Been
Understand
Science
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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. "
Zadie Smith
American
Waiting
Way
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Father
Writing
Wanted
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Family
People
School
" Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. "
Zadie Smith
Life
Nature
Everyday
" All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. "
Zadie Smith
Brain
Through
True
" I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. "
Zadie Smith
Person
Deep
Insight
" 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
Like
" I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle. "
Zadie Smith
Time
Pen
People
" It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate. "
Zadie Smith
Difficult
Book
Truth
" 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
Home
Literature
Time
" I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely. "
Zadie Smith
Shame
Direction
Pride
" I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it. "
Zadie Smith
Kind
America
Issues
" Don't confuse honours with achievement. "
Zadie Smith
Confuse
Achievement
Honours
" A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. "
Zadie Smith
Friendship
Easy
Women
" Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself. "
Zadie Smith
Yourself
Beautiful
Clever
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Day
Lost
Power
" When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. "
Zadie Smith
Data
Character
Website
" Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. "
Zadie Smith
Good
Stay
People
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Real
Always
Story
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Brain
Shape
Seems
" People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it's over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there's no down time. "
Zadie Smith
Children
You
Time
" Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. "
Zadie Smith
Own
Alone
Connection
" I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. "
Zadie Smith
Irrational
Nostalgic
Worry
" I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy. "
Zadie Smith
Writing
Think
Life
" Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives. "
Zadie Smith
People
World
Organization
" You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. "
Zadie Smith
You
Difference
Equality
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Never
Childish
Loved
" We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. "
Zadie Smith
Cannot
Only
Time
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Like
Me
Religious
" When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark. "
Zadie Smith
Dark
Always
Laughter