Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 October 1975
honesty stories
Full stories are as rare as honesty.
white different teeth
I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
caring artist choices
The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
interesting people political
People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
creativity motherhood ideas
The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
wall looks littles
Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
mistake book writing
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.
approval made feels
It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
good-friend america people
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. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
moving writing people
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.
sex writing world
I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
writing healthy noise
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.
brother mistake college
I was brought up with the sense that I was absolutely no different from my brothers. I went to college thinking I was absolutely no different from the men in college. But that's not true. I'm fundamentally different. The problem was not being able to understand difference and equality at the same time. It's something that we can't seem to comprehend. You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. It's a mistake.
balanced cut diet fatty kafka pick sentences
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.