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: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Favourites
Allies
Among
Children

More quotes by Zadie Smith

Image
Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
Zadie Smith
Image
I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
Zadie Smith
Image
First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
Zadie Smith
Image
I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
Zadie Smith
Image
It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
Zadie Smith
Image
Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie Smith
Image
Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
Zadie Smith
Image
I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.
Zadie Smith
Image
Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
Zadie Smith
Image
The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
Zadie Smith
Image
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
Image
Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
Zadie Smith
Image
[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
Zadie Smith
Image
Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
Zadie Smith
Image
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.
Zadie Smith
Image
You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
Image
Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
Zadie Smith
Image
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
Zadie Smith
Image
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.
Zadie Smith
Image
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