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" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Brain
Shape
Seems
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" 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. "
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" 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 to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.' "
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Me
Nothing
" 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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Literature
Time
" 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
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Reading
Place
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Time
Pen
People
" I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab. "
Zadie Smith
Always
Bit
Who
" 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 like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated. "
Zadie Smith
Feeling
Discomfort
You
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Enjoy
Succeed
Talk
" 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
" Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever. "
Zadie Smith
Good
Also
Change
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Duty
Explain
Argument
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Book
You
Time
" I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury. "
Zadie Smith
Early
You
Think
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Yourself
Beautiful
Clever
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
You
Think
Opinion
" 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
More
Pain
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Done
Results
Living
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Memories
Dance
Love
" I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical. "
Zadie Smith
Day
Lost
Power
" 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
" We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. "
Zadie Smith
Cannot
Only
Time
" You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. "
Zadie Smith
You
Difference
Equality
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Kind
America
Issues