While searching on Zadie Smith

• She's very precious about words. "There's this great quote by Nabokov. 'He wrote like a genius, he thought like a man of letters and he spoke like a child' . . . it's a bloody good quote, and I think it's true of some very, very great writers. I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab." She immediately qualifies herself - not that she's a great writer.

• She may be ambivalent about what she has written so far, but she seems to have supreme confidence about what she will go on to write. Has she got a great book in her? "If you didn't believe that you did, at some point, even if it's when I'm 60, then why would you do it?"

• “A work of art,” said Nabokov, “has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me.”

• The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one … This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals.

Culled from an interview of Zadie Smith.