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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
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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Firsts
Books
Book
Child
First
Sure
Children
Read
Writing
Else
Make
Stills
Time
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Rule
Anything
Spend
More quotes by Zadie Smith
Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
Zadie Smith
The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
Zadie Smith
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
Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
Zadie Smith
Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
Zadie Smith
Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
Zadie Smith
Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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
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 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
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
Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
Zadie Smith
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
Zadie Smith
All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
Zadie Smith
When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
Zadie Smith
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
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
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
Zadie Smith
I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
Zadie Smith
