Writer Quotes by Zadie Smith

You're a library of me.

— Zadie Smith

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

— Zadie Smith

I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

— Zadie Smith

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

— Zadie Smith

Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.

— Zadie Smith

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— 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…

— 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

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

The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.

— 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

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

— Zadie Smith

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to…

— 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…

— 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

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in…

— 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…

— Zadie Smith

Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger,…

— 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

I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing…

— Zadie Smith

Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just…

— Zadie Smith

Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that…

— Zadie Smith

“The term 'role model' is so odious, but the truth is it's a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a…

— 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

“Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when,…

— 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

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination:…

— Zadie Smith

I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.

— Zadie Smith

Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.

— 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.…

— Zadie Smith

I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.

— 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…

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the…

— Zadie Smith

“A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system…

— Zadie Smith

The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of…

— 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…

— Zadie Smith

“I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.”

— Zadie Smith