Top 60 Zadie Smith Quotes

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability – these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life – it changed the trajectory of my life.

I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don’t know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don’t have the guts to admit that I do.

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’m very attracted to exile literature – particularly Nabokov – exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.

I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.

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.’

Can’t a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?

The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.

World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: ‘How can I do it?’

I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.

There’s constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.

I can’t add. I don’t understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I’ve always been able to, and I’ve always liked to. Even if I didn’t understand it, I liked to.

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.

I love to dance, and sing – in the shower, not in public. I’m too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing – dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.

Writing is my way of expressing – and thereby eliminating – all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

I’m most honest about writing when I’m talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

I like books that don’t give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage.

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.

A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road – you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.

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 keeps you on your toes.

Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can’t be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you.

Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

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.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity… that’s the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren’t given equality of opportunity.

I don’t take notes. I don’t have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are.

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.

I just realized quite early on that I’m not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don’t write unless I really feel I need to, and that’s a luxury.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

You can’t state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

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.

The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you’re an artist who’s making something which isn’t how its mainstream appearance should be, there’s always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be ‘real’ as a rapper.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.

I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do.

When I think of the books I love, there’s always a little laughter in the dark.

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 don’t keep any copies of my books in the house – they go to my mum’s flat. I don’t like them around.

Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.

Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don’t always use it well.

The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.

Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.

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.

You know, you don’t expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.

I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you’re made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.

I’m always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.

The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.

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.

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.

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.

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

Don’t we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.

That’s the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain – they cannot be otherwise.

Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That’s a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it’s not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers.