Zadie Smith Quotes

191 quotes in 2540 categories

• It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in…
• A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
• Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
• Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of…
• But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared…
• Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
• 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 what you leave…
• Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as…
• I remember so clearly, in the early days, if I had to do a piece of press, they'd phone for me and say, 'Oh, we're…
• It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
• Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
• I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people…
• Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
• Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
• Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
• The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
• And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all…
• But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always…
• It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience…
• Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

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