

Zadie Smith's Quotes

Zadie Smith profile photo

Born: 1975-10-25
Profession: Novelist
Nation: British
Biography of Zadie Smith

See the gallery for quotes by Zadie Smith. You can to use those 8 images of quotes as a desktop wallpapers.
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Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.

Tags: Time, Writers, Young


Tags: Alone, Reason, True


Tags: Good, Pain, Read

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

Tags: Liberalism, Political, Positions


Tags: Away, Keep, Time


Tags: Sadness, Truth, Yourself


Tags: Creativity, Idea, Motherhood


Tags: Action, Illegal, Lack

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

Tags: Essential, Library, Place

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.

Tags: Crime, English, Thinking


Tags: Cannot, Time, Writers


Tags: Dark, Laughter, Love

Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

Tags: Bad, Life, Nature

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

Tags: Great, Thoughts, Women

Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.

Tags: Change, Good, Great

World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'

Tags: Ask, Question, Social

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

Tags: Expressing, Ways, Writing

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

Tags: Equality, State, Understand


Tags: Fair, Good, Time


Tags: Experience, Joy, Road


Tags: Friendship, Good, Women

All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.

Tags: Living, Student, Talk

Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.

Tags: Human, Making, Themselves


Tags: Enjoy, Talk, Why

Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you.

Tags: Books, Themselves, Time

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.

Tags: Far, Stronger, Weak

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Much more quotes by Zadie Smith below the page.

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.

Tags: Good, Leave, Write

English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.

Tags: Control, Time, Writing


Tags: English, Hopeless, Nature

I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to.

Tags: Else, Science, Understand


Tags: Mind, Trying, Work

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.

Tags: Book, Famous, Great


Tags: Idea, Life, Used

I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.

Tags: Act, Read, Write

I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

Tags: God, Lost, Power

I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. I'm too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.

Tags: Dance, Love, Old


Tags: Creative, Life, Writing

I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.

Tags: Essays, Read, Sound


Tags: Time, Understand, Working

I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do.

Tags: Hatred, Love, Maybe

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.

Tags: Cut, Diet, Reading


Tags: Another, Done, Living

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

Tags: Home, Serious, Time

If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage.

Tags: Difficult, Life, Wanted

In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I'm thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I've come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it keeps you on your toes.

Tags: Family, School, Time

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.

Tags: Help, Human, Time


Tags: Another, Faith, Often


Tags: Book, Difficult, Truth

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.

Tags: Equality, Feeling, Makes

My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.

Tags: Dad, Life, Mother

Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.

Tags: Him, Thought, Young

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

Tags: Beautiful, Funny, Yourself

One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.

Tags: Books, Read, Said


Tags: Child, Children, Time

Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers.

Tags: Accept, Beautiful, Film

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.

Tags: Brain, Cannot, Seems

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.

Tags: Character, Seems, Simple

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.

Tags: Real, Strange, Working


Tags: Heart, Idea, War


Tags: Country, Experience, Give

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.

Tags: American, Might, Waiting

Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don't, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It's not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that.

Tags: Human, Work, Yourself


Tags: Cannot, Good, Public


Tags: Character, Human, She

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.

Tags: Life, Wanted, Write


Tags: Human, Real, Short

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 most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.

Tags: Else, Give, Simple


Tags: Politics, Understand, Young


Tags: Brain, Future, True


Tags: Books, Far, Last


Tags: Joy, Loved, Place


Tags: Artists, Corner, Reality

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Tags: Confuse, Honours


Tags: Money, Popularity, Why

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

Tags: Growing, Life, Loved

I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.

Tags: Books, House, Keep

I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

Tags: Feeling, Give, Sense

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.

Tags: Against, Battle, Books

I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.

Tags: America, Book, Write


Tags: Idea, Often, Worry

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

Tags: Deep, Insight, Naive


Tags: Father, Wanted, Writing


Tags: Another, Pride, Write

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

Tags: Late, Time, White

I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.

Tags: Bit, Gift, Writers


Tags: Family, Friends, Writing

I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing.

Tags: Interested, Universal, Writing

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

Tags: Best, Give, Love


Tags: Good, Mistakes, Time


Tags: Confused, Joy, Time

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.

Tags: Funny, Public, Strange


Tags: Count, Limits, Readers


Tags: Short, Story, Trying


Tags: Known, Laws, Learned

It is in his knowledge that man has found his greatness and his happiness, the high superiority which he holds over the other animals who inhabit the earth with him, and consequently no ignorance is probably without loss to him, no error without evil.

Tags: Happiness, Ignorance, Knowledge