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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.
Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Pages
Writer
Leave
Either
Vocation
Write
Lifestyle
Matter
Page
Writing
Sentences
Good
Matters
More quotes by Zadie Smith
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
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
Zadie Smith
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
She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
Zadie Smith
I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
Zadie Smith
What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.
Zadie Smith
It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
Zadie Smith
Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
Zadie Smith
The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
Zadie Smith
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
I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.
Zadie Smith
The nineties, ecstatic decade!
Zadie Smith
Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
Zadie Smith
Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
Zadie Smith
The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
Zadie Smith
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
Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
Zadie Smith
I know a lot of people who read and think: George [Saunders] is so much fun. There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
Zadie Smith
Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
Zadie Smith
