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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. "
Zadie Smith
Me
Against
Battle
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" Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still. "
Zadie Smith
Joy
Reading
Place
" 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'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers. "
Zadie Smith
Most
Writing
Friends
" 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
" People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. "
Zadie Smith
People
Interesting
Political
" Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers. "
Zadie Smith
Feathers
Jump
People
" 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
" My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity. "
Zadie Smith
Me
Equality
Want
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Book
Great
People
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Politicians
Human
Artist
" I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time. "
Zadie Smith
Teeth
Time
White
" I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab. "
Zadie Smith
Always
Bit
Who
" 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
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
People
Ethics
Help
" 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
" 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'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing. "
Zadie Smith
Kind
Never
Universal
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
You
Trying
Story
" 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
" The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd. "
Zadie Smith
Threat
Motherhood
Just
" Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page. "
Zadie Smith
Page
Matters
Good
" I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do. "
Zadie Smith
Admit
Know
Love
" My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world. "
Zadie Smith
Black And White
Mother
Life
" 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
" World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?' "
Zadie Smith
Social
Question
How
" The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students. "
Zadie Smith
Students
Character
Simple
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Books
Identity
You
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Living
Like
Up
" I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around. "
Zadie Smith
Books
Like
Keep
" 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
Me