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
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. – 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
The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential. – Zadie Smith
Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives. – 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
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
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. – 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 recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. – Zadie Smith
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. – Zadie Smith
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. – 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
English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life – it changed the trajectory of my life. – Zadie Smith
Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. – Zadie Smith
Desperation, weakness, vulnerability – these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy. – Zadie Smith
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. – 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
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. – Zadie Smith
Don’t we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls. – Zadie Smith
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
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
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
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
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
I’m never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing. – Zadie Smith
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we’re also dark people with dark thoughts. – Zadie Smith
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. – Zadie Smith
