Zadie Smith quotes - page 5

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. (Zadie Smith)
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. View quote
Zadie Smith
Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control. View quote
Zadie Smith
As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue. View quote
Zadie Smith
The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential. View quote
Zadie Smith
I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction. View quote
Zadie Smith
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 in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame. View quote
Zadie Smith
English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life. View quote
Zadie Smith
I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers. View quote
Zadie Smith
Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls. View quote
Zadie Smith
It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange. (Zadie Smith)
It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions. View quote
Zadie Smith
Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy. View quote
Zadie Smith
My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world. View quote
Zadie Smith
Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands. View quote
Zadie Smith
People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. View quote
Zadie Smith
The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action. View quote
Zadie Smith
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying. View quote
Zadie Smith
It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate. View quote
Zadie Smith
Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. View quote
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 what you leave on the page. (Zadie Smith)
Don't confuse honours with achievement. View quote
Zadie Smith
You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. View quote
Zadie Smith
I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me. View quote
Zadie Smith
(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out) View quote
Zadie Smith