Zadie Smith Quotes

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

They call me the Albertan of Quebec. It stuck.

Universal human characteristics are a good base for great art.

We joke that St. Louis people love their own.

Being from Oregon, it's part of who I am.

When people still see me, even though I have been in Green Bay and Oakland, they still talk about Michigan.

I love my home state and my hometown. I'm so grateful to Birmingham and Alabama for what it made me.

It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.

At times, yes, I have been typecast. But I love having a regional identity in my songs. I want to deliver music that reflects the culture of our soil.

Yes, I've heard of the 'Mad Men' comparisons, but I like to think 'The Hour' has its own distinctive voice. Although it is set in 1956, I have tried to give it a contemporary edge, and its themes of love, passion, romance, fury, professional jealousy, and personal failure are universal, I think.

I grew up in Stoneham, a little suburb of Boston. It's pronounced 'Stone 'em' because Massachusetts doesn't bend to the will of 'how letters are supposed to be said.'

Tacoma is actually my hometown, but if you live within 40 minutes of Seattle, you say Seattle.

You need to take pride in where you're from.

I'm not gonna lie; I don't always like everything about Bow and I don't always like everyone in Bow and they don't always like me but on the whole I love where I come from. I'm proud of where I come from and I'm proud to represent that area.

A lot of people from Buffalo haven't even been outside of Buffalo. Probably 75% of Buffalo never even been in New York City. We just come from a different kind of place. You just have to be from there to kind of understand that.

Bill Monroe is not singing about life in America. He's singing about life in Kentucky and Tennessee. And yet it's had this tremendous impact, not just in America but in the world. Why is Bill Monroe's hyper-regional music so universal? We can be so different and yet still share a tremendous amount.

Lovers of Norfolk churches can never agree which is the best and I think one is either a Salle or a Cawston man.

In fact, in Aberdeen, Washington, I am known as Mr. Small Package!

Bologna girl, that's me.

I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.

Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.

I'm not sure what the proper label might be, or the most accurate one, but someone once called my stuff Southern Ohio Gothic and I thought that was fair.

To be born in Kentucky is a heritage; to brag about it is a habit; to appreciate it is a virtue.

In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.