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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. "
Zadie Smith
Thoughts
Dark
Great
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" 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'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers. "
Zadie Smith
Most
Writing
Friends
" 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
" Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. "
Zadie Smith
Good
Stay
People
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Class
You
Roots
" 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
Writing
Wanted
" 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
" 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
" Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. "
Zadie Smith
Own
Alone
Connection
" 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'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 want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely. "
Zadie Smith
Shame
Direction
Pride
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
People
Some People
Brand
" 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
" 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
" 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
" There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. "
Zadie Smith
Bigger
You
Thinking
" 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
" When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark. "
Zadie Smith
Dark
Always
Laughter
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Yourself
Truth
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab. "
Zadie Smith
Always
Bit
Who
" 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
" Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls. "
Zadie Smith
Why
Get
Know