Zadie Smith Quotes:- Zadie Smith (born 25 October 1975) is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer.
Inspirational Zadie Smith Quotes
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.
Zadie Smith
As far as I’m concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalog.
Zadie Smith
Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
Zadie Smith
Can’t a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
Zadie Smith
I like books that expose me to people, unlike me, and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is heroic in fiction.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
A lot of women, when they’re young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It’s easy to be friends when everyone’s 18.
Zadie Smith
Famous Quotes by Zadie Smith
You can’t state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we’re also dark people with dark thoughts.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
I like books that don’t give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
Powerful Quotes by Zadie Smith
Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives.
Zadie Smith
The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it’s over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there’s no downtime.
Zadie Smith
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Zadie Smith
Greatest Quotes on Zadie Smith
Don’t romanticize 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.
Zadie Smith
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
Zadie Smith
Don’t confuse honors with achievement.
Zadie Smith
It’s difficult, to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
Zadie Smith
I’m most honest about writing when I’m talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
Zadie Smith
Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
Zadie Smith
If you’re going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
Zadie Smith
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
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.
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith Quotes About Family
The roots of rap are originally ghettoized 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.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel than thinking you are right.
Zadie Smith
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 possibilities of those actions.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
I’m always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.
Zadie Smith
I have the 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.
Zadie Smith
Top Zadie Smith Quotes And Sayings
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.
Zadie Smith
I wouldn’t write about people who are living and who are close to me because I think it’s a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
Zadie Smith
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
Zadie Smith
World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: ‘How can I do it?’
Zadie Smith
It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused.
Zadie Smith
