A Quote by Zadie Smith

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.

Zadie Smith

Quote Topics

Bigger Comic Crime English Novel Right Than Thinking

Quote Author

Zadie Smith
British - Novelist
Born: October 25, 1975

'The Turnaround' isn't even really a crime novel. But you need conflict to make a novel, any kind of novel, and I don't know any other way to do it than crime.

George Pelecanos

The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character.

Elizabeth George

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

Colum McCann

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

James Ellroy

When a novel is based on an actual crime, it should do much more than loosely fictionalize it. The novel must stand alone as a work of art that justifies using the story for its own purposes.

Sarah Weinman

It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan.

Val McDermid

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

Carl Hiaasen

Between last night and this morning, I've been getting a lot of messages from overseas fans along the lines of 'There's an American comic ripping off Bleach!' I'm not that good at English, but I looked at the site and it seems it's a comic by Nick Simmons, the son of Gene Simmons. To be honest, I'm more bothered by the fact that Gene Simmons' son is a comic artist than whether or not it's a rip-off.

Tite Kubo

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

Garry Disher

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

Ian Mcewan

Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.

Iris Murdoch

North Korea is a religion. We are told that Kim is a god and that he knows what you are thinking and how many hairs are on your head. It is the only country which talks about 'thought crime' - even thinking is a crime.

Park Yeon-mi

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.