Deborah Smith Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Deborah Smith's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Author Deborah Smith's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 37 quotes on this page collected since 1955! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • What do you call love, then?" Someone I can't live without.

    Deborah Smith (2009). “On Bear Mountain”, p.184, BelleBooks
  • Simon Collinson, of digital publisher Canelo and über-cool Aussie mag The Lifted Brow, is our digital producer; Sarah Shin, Verso's comms director, is helping us out with press publicity; Soraya Gilanni, who mainly does production and set design for films and commercials, is our art director.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • A chorus of tough southern belles whispered, You need a loyal husband around here. Loyal to you, loyal to your family, loyal to your land. I added, Good in bed, smart, and romantic. Politically, socially, and religiously compatible. And he had to want children.

    Deborah Smith (2009). “On Bear Mountain”, p.229, BelleBooks
  • The hardest memories are the pieces of what might have been.

    Deborah Smith (2011). “A Place to Call Home”, p.4, Bantam
  • And to improve access to the UK publishing industry - I'm hoping to set up an internship or work experience for someone from a low-income background, as soon as we have the funds. While we don't have the funds, we won't have an intern.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • The LORD detests lying lips, but he delights in men who are truthful. PROVERBS 12:22

  • I read The Vegetarian and fell in love with it. A year later, I was invited to go and speak at the London Book Fair (which I'd never even heard of before), as they were gearing up for Korea being the market focus country in 2014. I met Max Porter there, Kang's editor at Portobello, sent him my sample, and the rest is history.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • I've translated two of Bae's novels, A Greater Music and Recitation, which are coming from Open Letter and Deep Vellum in October and January respectively. A Greater Music is a semi-autobiographical book centred on a Korean writer moving to Berlin, learning to live and even write in a foreign language.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • Wish it, believe it, and it will be so.

    Deborah Smith (2002). “Alice At Heart”, p.152, BelleBooks
  • I was in the second year of my PhD when I first had the idea - I'd recently started working as a translator, which meant firstly that I was hearing about amazing-sounding books from other translators, and also that I was getting enough of an insider's view of the publishing industry to be aware of all the implicit biases that made it so difficult for these books to ever get published, especially if they weren't from European languages (harder to discover, editors can't read the original, lack of funding programmes, authors who don't speak English).

    Source: thequietus.com
  • Life doesn't take itself seriously for long. Joy leaves an imprint even in the hardest sorrow.

  • Flattery is a lie covered in a bed of flowery words.

  • Whenever I visit Korea she [Kang] buys me lunch and takes me to a gallery. As if all this wasn't enough, she has incredible respect for translation as a creative, artistic practice - she insists that each English version is 'our book', offered to share her fees with me when she found out I wasn't getting paid for translating her publicity stuff, always asks the editor to credit me, and does so herself whenever she's interviewed. Too good to be true.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • We are all bodies of water, guarding the mystery of our depths, but some of us have more to guard than others.

    Deborah Smith (2002). “Alice At Heart”, p.10, BelleBooks
  • I suspected learning a language would be both useful and enjoyable (I love memorising lists of things), and would get rid of the embarrassment of being monolingual at 21. I'd been obsessed with reading for as long as I could remember, the only thing I'd ever thought I might want to be was a writer, but I was much better at crafting sentences than at stringing plots together.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • So the aim for the press was a mixture of things: to publish under-represented writing, which is an intersection of original language, style, content, and often its author's gender. To publish it properly, in a way that makes it clear that this is art, not anthropology. To spotlight the importance of translation in making cultures less dully homogenous.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • I teach Korean translation at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school, so I see an emerging generation too, who are around my age. I'm hoping to find time to mentor, and to help emerging translators to a first contract through Tilted Axis.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is a stylistically daring writer in love with surrealism, credited with being 'the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality to Bengali literature'. But though the (male) establishment used this label of erotica to dismiss her work, the sex scenes have exactly the same transgressive function as her use of chronology and narrative voice.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • Not only are unpaid internships exploitative, they're one of the main forces keeping publishing in this country a primary white middle-class industry, which has a direct knock-on effect on what gets published and how.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • Possibly the best thing about the whole experience is that Kang and I are now really good friends. It's as much of a pleasure and privilege to know her as a person as it is to translate her work. She's been over for two UK publicity tours, which means lots of time to chat on trains etc., and she was hear all last summer for a writer's residency in Norwich, where I got to meet her son too.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • Plus, publishing's inherent conservatism, means that what little did get through was weighted towards the commercial end of the scale, which is not the kind of writing that excites me.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • Happy people look young. You’re really afraid of getting older, aren’t you? You should only be afraid of getting less happy.

    Deborah Smith (2006). “The Crossroads Cafe”, p.228, BelleBooks
  • I did my BA in English lit, and hated the restriction - I'd always read more in translation than not; coming from a working-class background, what I knew of as British literature - the writers who made big prize lists and/or were stocked in WH Smith, Doncaster's only bookshop until I was 17 - seemed incredibly, alienatingly middle-class. Then in 2009, just after the financial crash, I graduated with no more specific skill than 'can analyse a bit of poetry'.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • There’s something very freeing about losing the anchors that have always defined you. Frightening, sad, but exhilarating in a poignant way, as well. You’re free to float to the moon and evaporate or sink to the bottom of the deepest ocean. But you’re free to explore. Some people confuse that with drifting, I suppose. I like to think of it as growing.

  • Our first-year list is Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay (translated by Arunava Sinha), Hwang Jung-eun (translated by Jung Yewon), and Khairani Barokka.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • A photograph is a souvenir of life!

  • Alongside Han Kang, there's only one other author I've chosen to translate so far - Bae Suah. Her work is radical both stylistically and politically, influenced by her own translation practice (she's translated the likes of Kafka, Pessoa, and Sadeq Hedayat into Korean). Her language is simply extraordinary.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • I taught myself the first year course while I was on the dole, then moved to London to do an MA at SOAS, which led straight into a PhD.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • All of which suggested literary translation, and Korean seemed a good bet - barely anything available in English, yet it was a modern, developed country, so the work had to be out there, plus the rarity would make it both easier to secure a student grant and more of a niche when it came to work.

    Source: thequietus.com
  • This and the small sample size inevitably leads to stereotypes - sweeping family sagas from India, 'lush' colonial romances from South-East Asia. Mother and daughter reconciling generational differences through preparing a 'traditional' meal together. Geishas. And even if something more exciting does manage to sneak through, it gets the same insultingly clichéd cover slapped on it anyway, so no one will ever know.

    Source: thequietus.com
Page 1 of 2
  • 1
  • 2
  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 37 quotes from the Author Deborah Smith, starting from 1955! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Deborah Smith quotes about: Books Country Language Literature Translations Writing