Writing Quotes by Zadie Smith

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

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

— Zadie Smith

Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you…

— 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

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

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

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

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

A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might…

— Zadie Smith

English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a…

— 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

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

— 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

“Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member…

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— 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

If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space.

— Zadie Smith

I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.

— 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