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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Well
Pleasure
Feel
Suffering
Happy
Feels
Pain
Really
Order
Thinking
Someone
Skip
Used
Street
Wells
Streets

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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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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.
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
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English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
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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.
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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.
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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
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