Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 October 1975
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.
childcare children people time
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.
exactly father quite suppose turned
I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do.
amoral anarchic beliefs complex english held morally seems
The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.
reader
Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
skins infection should
Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
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.
love lying african-american
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
library
You're a library of me.
ecstatic decades
The nineties, ecstatic decade!
writing thinking years
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.
squirrels doe
Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
odds mountain matter
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.