Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed. — 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
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger,… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when,… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you… — 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
The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of… — 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
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you… — 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
