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 Read Quote
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. Zadie Smith Read Quote
A lot of women, when they’re young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It’s easy to be friends when everyone’s 18. Zadie Smith Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely. Zadie Smith Read Quote
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 Read Quote
People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. Zadie Smith Read Quote
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 Read Quote
