Zadie Smith Quotes

I wrote 'Little Fires Everywhere' and sold the book in 2015, still the Obama years. The possibility of a Trump presidency was not on my radar.

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

In a novel, my feelings and sense of outrage can find a broader means of expression which would be more symbolic and applicable to many European countries.

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

I've written a lot of books in my time, and to write a book about Joe McCarthy and have some of the major media paying attention, I'm not used to that.

One of the things you want as a successful writer is the anonymity.

When I wrote 'Lord of the Flies' - I had no idea it would even get published.

The philosophy of individualism owes a great deal to the tradition of novel-writing and novel-reading. In its development and in its aesthetics, the novel is not politically neutral; it has been a participant in history all along.

I always grew up with the idea that in order to be a successful writer, I should have a book published.

When I need to take a side, I write a newspaper article and I tell my government, "You should not do that, you should do this." They don't listen to me, but I've been doing this for sixty years now. But, when I write a novel, I am not in that business.

I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.

The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.

I would have been an essayist in the 18th century. Maybe I'd have had one gag in the piece, but essentially I'd be saying something.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

Gore Vidal was a man of immense literary talent, some of which he used well, some of which he wasted.

A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.

Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.