ZADIE SMITH

English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.

I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do.

Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.

The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.

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.

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.

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.

It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.'

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.

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are.

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 access to books.

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.

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.