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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

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Scripts
Briefly
Wrote
Editor
Religious
Joined
Write
Cult
Wanted
Editors
Writing
Unfortunately
Life
Script
Foucault
Like
Discovered
Kafka

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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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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.
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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
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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?
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
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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.
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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