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" 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

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

" 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. "

" The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. "

" 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

Say

Strange

" 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. "

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

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

" Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you. "

" I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time. "

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

" Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed. "

" You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand 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. "

" Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control. "

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

" 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. "

" Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don't, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It's not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that. "

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

" The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause. "

" Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count. "

Zadie Smith

Want

Own

" 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. "

" You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books. "

" There is a kind of desperate need for somebody to tell everyone what to do, which I find really peculiar in America. And then when you tell them, they're not interested, because it's also a country where everybody's opinion is their opinion, and they really don't give a damn what you think. So it's a very odd experience. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "