British - Novelist | October 25, 1975 -
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.
Zadie Smith
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There's constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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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.
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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.
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There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.
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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.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are.
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When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
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I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.
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