Books Quotes by Zadie Smith

Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

— Zadie Smith

“Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before.”

— Zadie Smith

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

— Zadie Smith

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.

— Zadie Smith

There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

— Zadie Smith

The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

— Zadie Smith

One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about…

— Zadie Smith

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

I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

— 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…

— 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…

— Zadie Smith

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious…

— 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…

— Zadie Smith

“Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else…

— 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.…

— Zadie Smith

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

“Keisha Blake, whose celebrated will and focus did not leave her much room for angst, watched her friend ascend to the top…

— Zadie Smith

I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in…

— Zadie Smith

“He's one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is 'noble'.…

— 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…

— Zadie Smith

“...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

“In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not…

— Zadie Smith

“Writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka.…

— Zadie Smith

“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

“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

“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

“Maybe every author needs to keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write, believing in Barthes?…

— Zadie Smith

“It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed onto the boundary wall of Caldwell,…

— Zadie Smith

“She wanted to read things -- could not resist wanting to read things -- and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive.…

— Zadie Smith

When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark.

— Zadie Smith

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

— Zadie Smith

The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.

— Zadie Smith

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

— Zadie Smith

For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

— 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…

— Zadie Smith

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me,…

— Zadie Smith

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than…

— Zadie Smith