Zadie Smith Quotes

Because poets feel what we're afraid to feel, venture where we're reluctant to go, we learn from their journeys without taking the same dramatic risks.

I don't have to come up with a ha-ha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat. That's more important to me than a laugh.

My work is through my emotions, so everything kind of goes together.

There's a sadness to the human condition that I think music is good for. It gives a counterpoint to the visual beauty, and adds depth to pictures that they wouldn't have if the music wasn't there.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

High culture is paranoid about sentiment. But human beings are intensely sentimental.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

In the art world, sentimentality and intimacy and the emotive side of lives are considered very uncool. There's nervousness around intimacy.

Those emotions that are really strong, the ones that inspire a song, you can hold onto that. You can let it marinate for years and keep writing about it even better than you did then.

Ghosts are all around us. Look for them, and you will find them.

I want to entertain, but I'm interested in a whole range of feelings.

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.

Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

I don't deal in technique. I deal in emotions.

At its heartmeat core, writing is about exploring the questions of your heart on the assumption that what intrigues you, what inflames or amuses or ennobles you, will have the same effect on someone else. It's about taking chances, and taking risks, and pushing yourself to be honest in the issues that present themselves.

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Unless it hurts, unless there’s some vulnerability there, I don’t think you’re going to get good photographs.

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.