Zadie Smith Quotes

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.

I hadn't ever worked with an 'editor' until I was 26 - although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to write privately for a long, long time and not sully themselves with concerns about audience or the business side of writing.

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

I've always been a 'write first' artist: the drawings are always in service of the writing.

I guess that in a lot of ways, my writing is more of a character to me than something that I feel personally attached to.

I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.

When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

I'm a working writer; this is my job. So it matters to me that it's good. I sweat over every word. I don't just vomit this stuff up. It's agony. The only thing that comes close is childbirth, except it's like being in labor for eighteen months.

That's the advantage of being a writer: No matter what happens, as long as you survive it, it goes into the work.

I never want kids to walk away after a school presentation and say, 'I met a writer today.' I want them to say, 'I am a writer.'

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

Writing a book is an emotional odyssey, sometimes exhilarating, other times deflating.

As so many writers know, the experience of creating an imaginary world is closer to dreaming than it is to normal, grit-your-teeth work. It's preconscious rather than conscious. Ideas fall into your head, and the book writes you, rather than the other way around.

I feel a burden if I don't write.

I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.

When I am so intensely involved with writing my books, I don't like to reread them. I feel like that story is done.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

The process of writing a book has given me a whole new reverence for writers. Mechanically, it is a brutal process; emotionally, it's incredibly healing.

When you're actually inside the experience of writing something, in some ways, you're just writing. Ultimately, you fall in love with the characters, and you get excited about the story, and you're sitting there in your sweatpants or pajamas, and you do get a little lost in it.

I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.