Zadie smith

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

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.

If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

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...

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.

That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.

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

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

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.