About Zadie Smith: Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
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.
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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.
Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.
Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us.
In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I'm thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I've come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it ...
I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
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.
I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth st...
It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.'
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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.
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.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.
English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that. And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy.
