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" 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. "

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" 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

" Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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

Keep

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue. "

" 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. "

" I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. "

" 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. "

" If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space. "

" 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

Against

Battle

" 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. "

" Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever. "

" 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

" All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. "

" Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied. "

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

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