Zadie Smith Quotes

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Zadie Smith

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 25, 1975

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

A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road - you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.

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

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.

Zadie Smith

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are.

Zadie Smith

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.

Zadie Smith

The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.

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

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

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

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

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

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.

Zadie Smith

I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.

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 catalogue.

Zadie Smith

I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that. And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy.

Zadie Smith

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.

Zadie Smith

Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.

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