Zadie Smith Quotes

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Who judges best of a Man, his Enemies or himself?

Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know.

I'm my own worst critic.

I'm always my worst critic.

I am my own biggest critic.

You have to be able to analyze yourself and critique yourself from every which way.

Would I have fired me? Knowing me? No.

Interrogate yours hidden assumptions

You have to be critical of what you do every day, to analyze it and be willing to push it further.

To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practices on others

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.

To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you.

Writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are. The process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions.

It's very difficult for me to evaluate my own stuff.

Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one's arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion become painfully obvious on the written page.

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

An essential part of seeing clearly is finding the willingness to look closely and to go beyond our own ideas.

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.

With nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my preconceptions are.

More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don't is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively

One of the other reasons for writing this book [My Beloved World] was to hold on to the person you first met. More of the world knows about me now and follows me in a way that never happened before. I didn't want me, the inside of me, to change. Because I liked Sonia, the Sonia who has been. So another reason for writing the book was to hold on to that - whatever the best in Sonia was, to try to capture it.

You have to be ruthless with yourself, in terms of being honest about what is working and what is not.