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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Threat
Creativity
Idea
Ideas
Inherently
Motherhood
Absurd
Somehow
More quotes by Zadie Smith
It was a kiss from the past.
Zadie Smith
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
Zadie Smith
World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
Zadie Smith
One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
Zadie Smith
I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
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
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
I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Zadie Smith
I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
Zadie Smith
Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
Zadie Smith
A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
Zadie Smith
I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
Zadie Smith
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
She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
Zadie Smith
Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
Zadie Smith
We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Zadie Smith
And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
Zadie Smith
Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
Zadie Smith
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
