Top 100 Zadie Smith Quotes
#1. When all the time it was that grand tree, taking up half the garden with its roots and not allowing anything else to grow.
Zadie Smith
#2. There is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody
Zadie Smith
#3. She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she'd ever meant by the word.
Zadie Smith
#4. I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
Zadie Smith
#5. A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18.
Zadie Smith
#6. We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn't feel this way?
Zadie Smith
#7. or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth.
Zadie Smith
#8. And I'm not going to get any thinner or any younger, my ass is going to hit the ground, if it hasn't already
and I want to be with somebody who can still see me in here. I'm still in here. And I don't want to be resented or despised for changing ... I'd rather be alone.
Zadie Smith
#10. That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.
Zadie Smith
#11. It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
Zadie Smith
#12. Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison.
Zadie Smith
#13. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships, Language. Sensibility.
Zadie Smith
#14. Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.
Zadie Smith
#15. Yes, sometimes it's the strangers that sustain you.
Zadie Smith
#16. There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.
Zadie Smith
#17. I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.
Zadie Smith
#18. Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
Zadie Smith
#19. Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources.
Zadie Smith
#20. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
Zadie Smith
#21. People aren't poor because they make bad choices. They make bad choices because they're poor.
Zadie Smith
#22. The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
Zadie Smith
#23. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be.
Zadie Smith
#25. But I was so much older then," sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, "I'm younger than that now.
Zadie Smith
#26. He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
Zadie Smith
#27. [he] had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth
Zadie Smith
#29. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
Zadie Smith
#30. She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.
Zadie Smith
#31. Pulchritude
beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
Zadie Smith
#32. as if we were both trying to get on a see-saw at the same time - neither of us pressed too hard and a delicate equilibrium was allowed to persist.
Zadie Smith
#33. Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
Zadie Smith
#34. It's such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
Zadie Smith
#35. Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
Zadie Smith
#36. How long that song seemed - longer than life.
Zadie Smith
#37. Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her."
"Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea.
Zadie Smith
#38. Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one.
Zadie Smith
#39. Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity.
Zadie Smith
#40. He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire, the kind of talking that only increases it.
Zadie Smith
#41. Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.
Zadie Smith
#42. Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
Zadie Smith
#43. I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
Zadie Smith
#44. I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
Zadie Smith
#45. The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
Zadie Smith
#46. There's constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.
Zadie Smith
#48. In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
Zadie Smith
#49. Once they were the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her of the numbers, in case she forgets.
Zadie Smith
#50. then after a few miles you arrived at a new idea, that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness - or potential for goodness - a person possessed.
Zadie Smith
#51. It was the same now. Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia.
Zadie Smith
#52. For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt
something is gained but something is lost.
Zadie Smith
#53. Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
Zadie Smith
#54. Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
Zadie Smith
#55. Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don't make our own business?
Zadie Smith
#56. But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain. One
Zadie Smith
#57. As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.
Zadie Smith
#58. He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.
Zadie Smith
#59. (oh, he loves her; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly)
Zadie Smith
#60. If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space.
Zadie Smith
#61. They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Zadie Smith
#62. Thirty years - almost all of them really happy. That's a lifetime, it's incredible. Most people don't get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it's over...
Zadie Smith
#63. Don't you think they're as bored as you are? You think you're somebody special? You think I wake up everyday so happy to see you? You're a snob, just in the other way. Do you think you are the only one who wants something else? Another life?
Zadie Smith
#64. It seems to me," said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, "that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.
Zadie Smith
#65. The future's another country, man ... And I still ain't got a passport.
Zadie Smith
#66. Kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement.
Zadie Smith
#67. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
Zadie Smith
#68. Don't confuse honours with achievement.
Zadie Smith
#69. The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
Zadie Smith
#70. You are never stronger ... than when you land on the other side of despair.
Zadie Smith
#71. These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you - even when it isn't in your power to bestow it - and then when the real shit hits the fan, when you need them to be adults, suddenly they're children again.
Zadie Smith
#72. Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money.
Zadie Smith
#73. One of the advantages of loving women, of being loved by women: they will always do things far beyond the call of duty
Zadie Smith
#74. Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
Zadie Smith
#75. The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.
Zadie Smith
#76. People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
Zadie Smith
#77. Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti
Zadie Smith
#78. The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.
Zadie Smith
#79. can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize?
Zadie Smith
#80. this light was something else again. It buzzed and held you in its heat, it was thick, alive with pollen and insects and birds, and because nothing higher than one story interrupted its path, it gave all its gifts at once, blessing everything equally, an explosion of simultaneous illumination. "What
Zadie Smith
#81. A feminist who had always been supported by men - first my father and now the Noted Activist - and who, though she continually harangued me about the "nobility of labor," had never, as far as I knew, actually been gainfully employed.
Zadie Smith
#82. One of the many things TV does not show you is the potential range and horror of the human form. For this alone, thought Alex, it is rightly celebrated.
Zadie Smith
#83. Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
Zadie Smith
#84. Grass can be seen, although it is important not to
Zadie Smith
#85. Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew to understand this and exploit it fully.
Zadie Smith
#86. My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.
Zadie Smith
#87. My late twenties had passed in a weird state of timelessness, and I think now that not everyone could have fallen into a life like that, that I must have been somehow primed for it.
Zadie Smith
#88. A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.
Zadie Smith
#89. but that coldness stopped up the sentence in my mouth. "What
Zadie Smith
#90. They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
Zadie Smith
#91. This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
Zadie Smith
#92. More silence; children's silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.
Zadie Smith
#93. For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood.
Zadie Smith
#95. The shit is *not* the shit (this was Mo's mantra,) the *pigeon* is the shit.
Zadie Smith
#96. Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
Zadie Smith
#97. I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do.
Zadie Smith
#99. There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with.
Zadie Smith
#100. My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity ... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.
Zadie Smith
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