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" I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that. And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. "

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" 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

" I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me. "

Zadie Smith

Read

Anything

" If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. "

Zadie Smith

Life

Difficult

" The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd. "

" We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. "

" It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions. "

" Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts. "

" If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time. "

" 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. "

" I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. I'm too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. "

" 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. "

" Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us. "

Zadie Smith

Good

Pain

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. "

" I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated. "

" I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific. "

" 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. "

" 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

Religious

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still. "

" The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action. "

" I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. "

" I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely. "