Quotes from Zadie Smith

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.

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.

Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.

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.

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.

She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.

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.

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.

I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.

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.

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.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

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 they succeed in terms the culture understands.

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.

Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.

World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

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.

And it's time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings.

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.

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.