606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

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

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.

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

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.

That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.

I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.