Quote

You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

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
Children
Favourites
Allies
Among

More quotes by Zadie Smith

Image
Full stories are as rare as honesty.
Zadie Smith
Image
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
Zadie Smith
Image
Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
Zadie Smith
Image
I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
Zadie Smith
Image
English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
Zadie Smith
Image
World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
Zadie Smith
Image
Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
Zadie Smith
Image
For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
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
Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
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
It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
Zadie Smith
Image
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.
Zadie Smith
Image
You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
Zadie Smith
Image
When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
Zadie Smith
Image
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
Zadie Smith
Image
The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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
No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
Zadie Smith
Image
He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith