Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 October 1975
stories ends
The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
sole dictionary
I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
achievement honour
Don't confuse honours with achievement.
life two different
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
writing pages matter
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.
future past perfect
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
writing space people
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
people looks use
When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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.
ideas two people
It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
sex writing world
I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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.
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.
people pet way
I'm just interested in women's friendships generally. It always seems to me, and this is just my pet theory, that women are kind of at the sharp end of capitalism one way or another. Mainly because they buy everything. In a practical sense, women buy most things. They're always comparing - to friends, to famous people, to other people. An obsessive act of comparison.