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" Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control. "
Zadie Smith
Good Time
Know
You
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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. "
Zadie Smith
Time
Pen
People
" 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
" 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
" It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate. "
Zadie Smith
Difficult
Book
Truth
" The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd. "
Zadie Smith
Threat
Motherhood
Just
" I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers. "
Zadie Smith
Most
Writing
Friends
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Children
You
Time
" Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers. "
Zadie Smith
Feathers
Jump
People
" 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
" When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark. "
Zadie Smith
Dark
Always
Laughter
" 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
" When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. "
Zadie Smith
Like
Me
Religious
" English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life. "
Zadie Smith
Life
Growing Up
Loved
" There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. "
Zadie Smith
Bigger
You
Thinking
" 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
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Want
Find
Last
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
You
Trying
Story
" I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab. "
Zadie Smith
Always
Bit
Who
" 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
" 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 want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely. "
Zadie Smith
Shame
Direction
Pride
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. "
Zadie Smith
Cannot
Only
Time