Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Don't confuse honours with achievement. "
Zadie Smith
Confuse
Achievement
Honours
Related Quotes:
" 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
Book
You
Time
" There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. "
Zadie Smith
Bigger
You
Thinking
" 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
Stronger
Empathy
You
" I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. "
Zadie Smith
Person
Deep
Insight
" 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
Good
Stay
People
" If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. "
Zadie Smith
Life
Difficult
Me
" I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab. "
Zadie Smith
Always
Bit
Who
" I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. "
Zadie Smith
Irrational
Nostalgic
Worry
" 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
Want
Find
Last
" Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control. "
Zadie Smith
Good Time
Know
You
" 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
Memories
Dance
Love
" People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. "
Zadie Smith
People
Interesting
Political
" You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. "
Zadie Smith
You
Difference
Equality
" 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
Two
Writing
Control
" When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark. "
Zadie Smith
Dark
Always
Laughter
" 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
Living
Like
Up
" 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
Know
Opportunities
People
" 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
Early
You
Think
" I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers. "
Zadie Smith
Most
Writing
Friends
" 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
Admit
Know
Love
" Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever. "
Zadie Smith
Good
Also
Change
" 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
Like
Way
Trying
" 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. "
Zadie Smith
Read
Anything
Me
" When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. "
Zadie Smith
Like
Me
Religious
" My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity. "
Zadie Smith
Me
Equality
Want
" 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
People
World
Organization
" I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame. "
Zadie Smith
Book
Great
People
" One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search. "
Zadie Smith
Books
Identity
You
" 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
You
Trying
Story
" Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. "
Zadie Smith
Own
Alone
Connection