Quote

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

Zadie Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Really
Teeth
Time
Wrote
Late
White
Didn
Feel
Feels
Different
Nineties

More quotes by Zadie Smith

Image
Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie Smith
Image
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.
Zadie Smith
Image
This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
Zadie Smith
Image
The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
Zadie Smith
Image
You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
Zadie Smith
Image
I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
Zadie Smith
Image
World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
Zadie Smith
Image
(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
Zadie Smith
Image
When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
Zadie Smith
Image
... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
Zadie Smith
Image
Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
Zadie Smith
Image
People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
Zadie Smith
Image
I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
Zadie Smith
Image
Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
Zadie Smith
Image
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.
Zadie Smith
Image
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith
Image
When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
Zadie Smith
Image
The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.
Zadie Smith
Image
A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
Zadie Smith
Image
For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
Zadie Smith