Zadie Smith aka Zadie Adeline Smith FRSL (born 25 October 1975) is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010. This persuasive Zadie Smith Quotes will make you think creatively.
Best Zadie Smith Quotes
- “Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.” – Zadie Smith
- “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.” – Zadie Smith
- “The past is always tense, the future perfect.” – Zadie Smith
- “Time is how you spend your love.” – Zadie Smith
- “Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.” – Zadie Smith
- “Don’t romanticize 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
- “Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.” – Zadie Smith
- “A writer’s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.” – Zadie Smith
- “Don’t confuse honors with achievement.” – Zadie Smith
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“The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.” – Zadie Smith
- “It’s gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.” – Zadie Smith
- “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
- “Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.” – Zadie Smith
- “Don’t live in a way that makes you feel dead.” – Zadie Smith
- “Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.” – Zadie Smith
- “People don’t settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.” – Zadie Smith
- “Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie … and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?” – Zadie Smith
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“Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.” – Zadie Smith
- “Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?” – Zadie Smith
- “The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It’s not a selling point, it’s not a ‘quirky’ feature, it’s not a cynical marketing ploy, it’s not an artistic statement, it’s not even a plot device. It’s a fact, like seedless grapes.” – Zadie Smith
- “Pulchritude–beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.” – Zadie Smith
- “Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we’re also dark people with dark thoughts.” – Zadie Smith
- “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.” – Zadie Smith
- “She had that thing most people don’t have – curiosity. She might not have always got the right answers, but she wanted to ask the questions. It’s very hard if you are interested in ideas and all that, ideas and the philosophies of the past, it’s very hard to find someone around here to really talk to. That’s the tragedy of the thing really I mean when you think about it. Certainly, I can’t find anyone around here to talk to anymore. And for a woman, it’s even harder you see. They can feel very trapped – because of the patriarchy. I do feel everyone needs to have these little chats now and then.” – Zadie Smith
