Zadie Smith Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• 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

  Writing, Space, People

  "Zadie Smith's rules for writers". www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

• Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Pages, Matter

  "Zadie Smith's rules for writers", www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

• Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Enemy, Trying

  "Zadie Smith's rules for writers". www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

• Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Sadness, Hands

  "Zadie Smith's rules for writers" by Zadie Smith, www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

• It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Thinking, Feelings

• I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Thinking, Opposites

  "Geek gek, n (slang ) A misfit, a rebel, sometimes a troublemaker. 'While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius' (Apple Computer advertising campaign, 1997) Top 50 Geeks 1-25 (Part 1 of 2)". www.heraldscotland.com. July 16, 2005.

• The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Might, Reason

• When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.

  Zadie Smith

  Lying, Believe, Writing

• 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.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Want, Who We Are

  "This is how it feels to me". www.theguardian.com. October 13, 2001.

• Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Voice, People

• A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, World, Duty

• Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.

  Zadie Smith

  Lying, Writing, Bridges

  "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays". Book by Zadie Smith, 2009.

• It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Tricks, Novel

  "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays". Book by Zadie Smith, 2009.

• 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, Writing, Ambition

  "White knuckle ride". The Guardian interview, www.theguardian.com. December 11, 2000.

• When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Intimate, Young

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Way, Eliminating

  "On the beginning" by Zadie Smith, www.theguardian.com. July 15, 2006.

• It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Childhood, Structure

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Fall, Writing, Epic

• The young people have a phrase for this now, which is "slay in your lane." That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, People, Work Out

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Years

  "In Essays, Author Zadie Smith Reveals Her Process". Interview with Melissa Block, www.npr.org. November 11, 2009.

• Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Luxury, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Zadie Smith

  Moving, Writing, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.

  Zadie Smith

  Real, Writing, Expression

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Thinking, People

  "In Essays, Author Zadie Smith Reveals Her Process". Interview with Melissa Block, www.npr.org. November 11, 2009.

• First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

  Zadie Smith

  Children, Book, Writing

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