« All Writing Quotes · Zadie Smith's Page
Writing Quotes by Zadie Smith
- 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.
- 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 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…
- 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.
- Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in…
- I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
- If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
- Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
- Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
- English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I…
- I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you…
- I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the…
- I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to…
- When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly…
- When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have…
- The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
- We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do…
- Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted…
- It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
- I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted…
More Writing Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then… — Paul Auster
- When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush… — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach
- In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing… — Billie Joe Armstrong
- I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. — Andrea Arnold
- Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. — Sholem Asch
- Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core… — Isaac Asimov
- If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. — Isaac Asimov
- Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. — Isaac Asimov