People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it’s over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there’s no down time. – Zadie Smith
It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. – 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
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. – Zadie Smith
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. – Zadie Smith
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. – Zadie Smith
You can’t state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. – 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
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
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. – Zadie Smith
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. – Zadie Smith
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. – Zadie Smith
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. – Zadie Smith
People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. – Zadie Smith
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. – Zadie Smith
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. – Zadie Smith
