Quote

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

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
First
Sure
Children
Read
Writing
Else
Make
Stills
Time
Still
Rule
Anything
Spend
Firsts
Books
Book
Child

More quotes by Zadie Smith

Image
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
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
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
Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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
The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
Zadie Smith
Image
In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
Zadie Smith
Image
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
Image
Full stories are as rare as honesty.
Zadie Smith
Image
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
Zadie Smith
Image
Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
Zadie Smith
Image
I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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
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
Image
Time is how you spend your love.
Zadie Smith
Image
It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
Zadie Smith
Image
No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
Zadie Smith
Image
It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
Zadie Smith
Image
World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
Zadie Smith
Image
Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
Zadie Smith