Zadie Smith Quotes

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I'm just interested in serialization in fiction. I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

In re-reading 'Presumed Innocent,' the one thing that struck me - and I re-read the book four different times in writing 'Innocent,' interested in different things each time - but I did think there were a couple of extra loops in the plot that I probably didn't need. The other thing that sort of amazed me was how discursive the book was.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

Personally, I love books, and I am interested in the notion that stories are told better in different media depending on the story.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

I write as if I'm someone reading the book - often people ask if I write one strand first and then go back and seed in the other, but I don't think I could keep track of who knows what, and the tension would come out wrong, so the answer is no - I write it more or less in the order you read it.

American writers reduce the length of time devoted to exposition and character development.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.

It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.