Quote

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.

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
Ones
Wants
Making
Sometimes
Life
Illusion
Resources

More quotes by 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
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
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
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
I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
Zadie Smith
Image
[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
Zadie Smith
Image
It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
Zadie Smith
Image
An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
Zadie Smith
Image
I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
Zadie Smith
Image
(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
Zadie Smith
Image
Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
Zadie Smith
Image
It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
Zadie Smith
Image
World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
Zadie Smith
Image
Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
Zadie Smith
Image
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Zadie Smith
Image
Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
Zadie Smith
Image
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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
Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
Zadie Smith
Image
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith