One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before.” — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me,… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years.… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“...within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anyone's baby, I could only be a female human,… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“Writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka.… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts--and they never fail to… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“It was a journalist (it was always journalists these days), and she had something to read to him. She’d had a crash… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“Maybe every author needs to keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write, believing in Barthes?… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“She wanted to read things -- could not resist wanting to read things -- and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive.… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed onto the boundary wall of Caldwell,… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts--and they never fail to have a… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people’s things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what’s… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
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… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts,… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship and Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
![“For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.” quote by Zadie Smith](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/10b/zadie-smith-584_books_for-me-george-saunders-novel-lincoln-in_765713.jpg)
