Zadie Smith

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

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.

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.

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

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

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

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.

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.

Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.

The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.