Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 October 1975
country men passports
The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
believe deserve-love water
We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
reality rapper artist
Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
book reading people
Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
selfish
I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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.
sweet grandmother people
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.
connections consciousness reason
Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
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.
writing enemy trying
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
book giving feelings
I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
character past names
And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time.
women knowing awkward
She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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.