Quote

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 another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

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
Thing
Living
Horrific
Think
Write
Anytime
Thinking
Another
Disguise
People
Persons
Violent
Person
Close
Done
Wouldn
Writing
Fiction
Even
Results

More quotes by Zadie Smith

Image
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
Image
Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
Zadie Smith
Image
The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
Zadie Smith
Image
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.
Zadie Smith
Image
Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
Zadie Smith
Image
Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
Zadie Smith
Image
It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
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
An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
Zadie Smith
Image
Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
Image
I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
Zadie Smith
Image
And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
Zadie Smith
Image
The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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 I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
Zadie Smith
Image
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
Zadie Smith
Image
Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
Zadie Smith
Image
I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
Zadie Smith
Image
…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Image
He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith