606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.

I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.

Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are.

Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you.

The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.

A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road - you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.

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.