About Zadie Smith: Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer.
Don't confuse honours with achievement.
Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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.
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 d...
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.
Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
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...
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?
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.
I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing.
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.
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 acc...
I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.
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.
I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
