110+ Zadie Smith Quotes On Writing, Reading And Fiction

Zadie Smith is a British novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She is best known for her novels White Teeth and On Beauty, both of which won multiple awards. Smith is also a professor of Creative Writing at New York University and a tenured professor of Fiction at Princeton University. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Zadie Smith on love, writing, reading.

Top 10 Zadie Smith Quotes

1. You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
2. 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.
3. The past is always tense, the future perfect.
4. Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
5. Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
6. She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
7. Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
8. …maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
9. Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
10. ...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

Zadie Smith Short Quotes

• There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
• I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
• I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
• You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
• Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
• World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
• Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
• Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
• Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
• Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.

Zadie Smith Quotes About Love

Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time. — Zadie Smith

This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love. — Zadie Smith

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free. — Zadie Smith

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

She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune. — 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

I am very selfish, really. I lived for love. — Zadie Smith

We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention. — Zadie Smith

I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so. — Zadie Smith

She loved you in the morning because the day was new. — Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith Quotes About Writing

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

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. — Zadie Smith

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. — Zadie Smith

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them. — Zadie Smith

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. — Zadie Smith

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood. — Zadie Smith

The young people have a phrase for this now, which is "slay in your lane." That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works. — Zadie Smith

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers. — Zadie Smith

I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world. — 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

Zadie Smith Quotes About Reading

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. — Zadie Smith

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

Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything. — Zadie Smith

Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'? — Zadie Smith

Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would. — Zadie Smith

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. — 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

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. — Zadie Smith

I know a lot of people who read and think: "George [Saunders] is so much fun." There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist. — Zadie Smith

It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way. — Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith Quotes About Fiction

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

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

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life. — Zadie Smith

I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific. — 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

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? — Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith Quotes About Life

Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over. — Zadie Smith

The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work. — Zadie Smith

Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format? — Zadie Smith

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. — Zadie Smith

You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence. — 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

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources. — Zadie Smith

It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. 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. — Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith Quotes About Write

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. — Zadie Smith

When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing. — Zadie Smith

And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive. — Zadie Smith

I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always. — Zadie Smith

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world. — Zadie Smith

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone. — Zadie Smith

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. — Zadie Smith

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

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

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

Zadie Smith Famous Quotes And Sayings

We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time. — Zadie Smith

And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time. — Zadie Smith

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign. — Zadie Smith

The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes. — Zadie Smith

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

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

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. — Zadie Smith

It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned. — Zadie Smith

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. — Zadie Smith

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. — Zadie Smith

I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure. — Zadie Smith

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages. — Zadie Smith

People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it. — Zadie Smith

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. — Zadie Smith

But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance. — 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

I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle. — Zadie Smith

To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold. — Zadie Smith

No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack — Zadie Smith

They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you. — Zadie Smith

... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt. — Zadie Smith

13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable. — Zadie Smith

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

It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing. — Zadie Smith

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is. — Zadie Smith

I'm just interested in women's friendships generally. It always seems to me, and this is just my pet theory, that women are kind of at the sharp end of capitalism one way or another. Mainly because they buy everything. In a practical sense, women buy most things. They're always comparing - to friends, to famous people, to other people. An obsessive act of comparison. — Zadie Smith

Any woman who counts on her face is a fool. — Zadie Smith

Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know? — Zadie Smith

Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead. — Zadie Smith

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. — 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

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

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost. — Zadie Smith

The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with. — Zadie Smith

Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going. — Zadie Smith

Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure. — Zadie Smith

It was a kiss from the past. — Zadie Smith

Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands. — Zadie Smith

You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies. — Zadie Smith

I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death. — Zadie Smith

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

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else. — Zadie Smith

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me. — Zadie Smith

An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply — Zadie Smith

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made. — Zadie Smith

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet. — Zadie Smith

'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition. — Zadie Smith

I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter. — Zadie Smith

The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action. — Zadie Smith

Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead. — Zadie Smith

Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as I do, and might be happy to tag along with me on this search for clarity, for precision. I love that aspect of writing. Nothing makes me happier than to hear a reader say: that’s just what I’ve always felt, but you said it clearly. — Zadie Smith

You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal. — Zadie Smith

It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy — Zadie Smith

Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy. — Zadie Smith

The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport. — Zadie Smith

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. — Zadie Smith

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience. — Zadie Smith

Each couple is its own vaudeville act. — Zadie Smith

When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion. — Zadie Smith

[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance. — Zadie Smith

Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived. — Zadie Smith

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared. — Zadie Smith

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. — 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

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. — Zadie Smith

When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month. — Zadie Smith

Life Lessons by Zadie Smith

1. Zadie Smith's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and respecting the diversity of experiences and perspectives in our world.
2. She also highlights the power of storytelling to bring people together and to create meaningful connections between individuals.
3. Through her work, Smith encourages readers to think critically and to challenge the status quo in order to create a more equitable and just society.