This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?
Zadie SmithYou become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
Zadie SmithFate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
Zadie SmithTry to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith