Quote

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 need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Type
Think
Feel
Novel
Thinking
Feels
Either
Urgency
Needs
Luxury
Writing
Quite
Realized
Going
Read
Otherwise
Every
Write
Early
Years
Two
Unless
Really
Need

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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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.
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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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.
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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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.
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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.
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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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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.
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The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
Zadie Smith
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Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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