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" 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
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count. "
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" 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. "
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" Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts. "
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" 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
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" 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
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" 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
" 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'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
" The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action. "
Zadie Smith
Action
Lack
Illegal
" A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road - you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. "
Zadie Smith
Joy
Road
Feel
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
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" English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control. "
Zadie Smith
Two
Writing
Control
" 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
" It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange. "
Zadie Smith
Like
Say
Strange
" You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. "
Zadie Smith
You
Difference
Equality
" I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash. "
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Like
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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
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Life
" We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. "
Zadie Smith
Cannot
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Time
" 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
" Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied. "
Zadie Smith
Tell
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Truth
" Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever. "
Zadie Smith
Good
Also
Change
" 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
Me
" Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you. "
Zadie Smith
Important
Space
Time
" 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
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" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Hopeless
Over
Got