Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 October 1975
sadness writing hands
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
selfish
I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
selfish
I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
self good-times knows
Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
empathy stronger needs
Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
computer internet disconnected
Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
country men passports
The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
games numbers video
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.
love lying african-american
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
trying stories pages
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.
deserve-love water cards
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
sound like-me carver
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.
shadow white-teeth loses
...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
writing want who-we-are
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.