Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. Zadie Smith Read Quote
Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel. Zadie Smith Read Quote
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. Zadie Smith Read Quote
Desperation, weakness, vulnerability – these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy. Zadie Smith Read Quote
If you’re going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time. Zadie Smith Read Quote
The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause. Zadie Smith Read Quote
In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I’m thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I’ve come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it keeps you on your toes. Zadie Smith Read Quote
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 Read Quote
English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be. Zadie Smith Read Quote
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. Zadie Smith Read Quote
