Zadie Smith Quotes

Author Image

Zadie Smith

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 25, 1975

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 down time.

Zadie Smith

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Zadie Smith

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

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

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

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.

Zadie Smith

The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.

Zadie Smith

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.

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith

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.

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith

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