Zadie Smith Quotes

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Zadie Smith

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 25, 1975

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

Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.

Zadie Smith

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

Zadie Smith

Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.

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

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.

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith

I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.

Zadie Smith

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.

Zadie Smith

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.

Zadie Smith

There is a kind of desperate need for somebody to tell everyone what to do, which I find really peculiar in America. And then when you tell them, they're not interested, because it's also a country where everybody's opinion is their opinion, and they really don't give a damn what you think. So it's a very odd experience.

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith

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.

Zadie Smith

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.

Zadie Smith

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.

Zadie Smith

English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith