Zadie Smith Quotes

My whole act is confession.

I'm more comfortable revealing myself than hiding behind metaphors. I respond to artists who reveal something of themselves.

I'm not performing anymore. I reveal myself to the audience. I reveal myself. That's the show now.

I've always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you've got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn't supposed to be easy.

I reveal too much of myself.

It's how I express myself - through storytelling and characters. They often reveal very intimate, vulnerable sides of myself.

Acting is a form of confession.

I remember hearing someone say that good acting is more about taking off a mask than putting one on, and in movie acting, certainly that's true. With the camera so close, you can see right down into your soul, hopefully. So being able to do that in a way is terrifying, and in another way, truly liberating. And I like that about it.

Although rap is about boasting, it's also about honesty and expressing your emotions.

With music, you're really showing someone a piece of your soul. You're saying, 'This is mine. I wrote this, I made this, I'm performing this. This is how I'm presenting it to you.' There's something really scary about that, but there's also something next-worldly about it, too.

Writing songs is super intimate. It's a bit like getting naked.

What most people know about me, they know through my music. This time, I've tried to open that door as wide as possible. These songs are a giant step closer to who I really am and what my music is all about. Hence the title.

Everything I write is highly personal, but put in such a way that it's not dropping everything in someone's lap. Although sometimes I think 'The Taxi Ride' embarrasses me, because sometimes I think it's too close.

Songwriting is the most terrifying thing to me, because you are really laying your heart out there.

I think when you're telling a story from inside of you that's genuine, people connect with it.

Writing is a very intimate thing, especially when you write lyrics and sing them in front of someone for the first time. It's like a really embarrassing situation. To me, singing is almost like crying, and you have to really know someone before you can start crying in front of them.

You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.

You know, I've sung a lot of emotional songs in my life, but when you're writing it yourself, it's very difficult to decide what to reveal.

With my fan base, I'm just vulnerable. I'm very transparent and vulnerable.

If there's something you want to say or talk about, then that's what rap is all about - talking about your own experience.

As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.

The thing about comedy is it gives you a platform to expose your own shortcomings, so it becomes a public display of weirdness.

Really unfiltered personal writing is cool to me. I'm like, 'How did you show that to everyone?'

I think it's sort of rare in TV shows or movies to see people being vulnerable. That's sort of scary to an audience.

If you're up on a stage, naked and solo and singing songs to people, there's not much place to hide, so you may as well confess what you want to confess and say what you want to say, whatever that is. Some songs just turn out as being more about me, and some are more through the eyes of other people, or third-person descriptions of people.