Zadie Smith quotes - page 4

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 kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy. (Zadie Smith)
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage. View quote
Zadie Smith
Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language. View quote
Zadie Smith
Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison. View quote
Zadie Smith
... the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. View quote
Zadie Smith
While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became. View quote
Zadie Smith
That girl,' tutted Alsana as her front door slammed, 'swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time. View quote
Zadie Smith
A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow. View quote
Zadie Smith
Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. View quote
Zadie Smith
The Guardian Interview 1 August 2013. View quote
Zadie Smith
You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages. (Zadie Smith)
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you. View quote
Zadie Smith
I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle. View quote
Zadie Smith
World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?' View quote
Zadie Smith
All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it. View quote
Zadie Smith
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. View quote
Zadie Smith
The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd. View quote
Zadie Smith
English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be. View quote
Zadie Smith
Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. View quote
Zadie Smith
I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. I'm too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible. View quote
Zadie Smith
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts. (Zadie Smith)
Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed. View quote
Zadie Smith
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 joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. View quote
Zadie Smith
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. View quote
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 the time. View quote
Zadie Smith