A Quote by Zadie Smith

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time. — © Zadie Smith
I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
I thought my teeth were white until I washed my face with Noxzema. My teeth are off-white. I'm not even white. I'm off-white. It's a new race; we will prevail!
I love cookbooks for completely different reasons. I love 'The Harry's Bar Cookbook' and Marco-Pierre White's 'White Heat' for their feel. For pure learning, Gray Kunz wrote a great cookbook, 'The Elements of Taste', published in 2001. The first time I read Charlie Trotter's, the Chicago chef's first cookbook, I was blown away.
It's funny because I want my teeth to be, like, neon 'Real Housewives' white, but mine have stopped taking to teeth whitening. When I talk to my dentist, I'm like, 'They can be that white,' and he's like, 'Veneers can be that white.'
For me songwriting is very...it's almost like an accident. 'Oh I accidentally wrote about that.' I sit down with the urge to write a song and then afterward it turns out being really personal. I get really overwhelmed by how I feel a lot and sometimes - I feel like my body and my brain can't deal with all the different emotions and I feel like I'm just going to explode.
When I started, I had a really hard time getting work. It was the mid- to late-nineties. There was the WB. My age was perfect for it, but I just never came across as a youngster. I had to grow into my age in order to start working, and by the time I did, it was when things started to get good.
I'm always trepidatious and excited about what I do. I wouldn't choose to do something, unless I am really excited about it.
I grew up playing guitar in the late Nineties, early 2000s, so a very acoustic-driven pop-rock era, and then in college, I started listening to Jason Isbell and Kacey Musgraves. Then I really fell in love when I discovered really old country, like June Carter Cash - one of my all-time favorites.
I mean, the death in the late eighties and early nineties really shook out a lot of hacks. The pond just sort of dried up for a lot of really bad comedians.
I really like the Nineties! I want to bring back more of the Nineties, like the 'Spice Girls', 'Empire Records', Chloe Sevigny. I don't think anyone really gave it enough credit.
I wrote 'Jungle' in my bedroom when I was having a manic time with a particular girl. Everyone thinks it's this really upbeat song, but it's not; it was just a really manic time, so I wrote a song about it.
"Only write what you know" is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it's like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream and the rest of them.
Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.
I shaved away my teeth and made them into little pencil points for nice teeth, that's kind of weird if you think about it. I was a notorious teeth-grinder, so all my front teeth became a couple millimeters shorter.
The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different even if there's a risk of it going wrong.
The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different, even if there's a risk of it going wrong.
The first time I wrote a song, I couldn't really believe - 'Can you just do that? You're just allowed?' I never thought about songs on the radio and who wrote them.
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