Top 100 Zadie Smith Quotes
#1. The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted 'Time Magazine's book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.
Mal Peet
#2. ... maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous ... . - Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
#3. People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.
Sarah Waters
#4. There's never any knowing - how am I to put it? - which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever. - E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread
Zadie Smith
#5. All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
#6. 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
#7. I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith
#8. 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
#9. It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
Zadie Smith
#11. She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she'd ever meant by the word.
Zadie Smith
#12. And I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn's famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships - all relations - involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?
Zadie Smith
#13. A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.
Zadie Smith
#14. Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
Zadie Smith
#15. The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
Zadie Smith
#16. I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
Zadie Smith
#17. As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
Zadie Smith
#18. 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
#19. You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
Zadie Smith
#20. One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.
Zadie Smith
#21. A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals
that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
Zadie Smith
#22. The fundamental skill of all mothers - the management of time - was beyond her.
Zadie Smith
#23. Not everyone wants this conventional little life you're rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire. And when it's time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I'm not afraid.
Zadie Smith
#24. He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
Zadie Smith
#25. We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn't feel this way?
Zadie Smith
#26. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before.
Zadie Smith
#27. I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
Zadie Smith
#28. or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth.
Zadie Smith
#29. The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Zadie Smith
#30. Leah watches Natalie stride over to her beautiful kitchen with her beautiful child. Everything behind those French doors is full and meaningful. The gestures, the glances, the conversations that can't be heard. How do you get to be so full? And so full of only meaningful things?
Zadie Smith
#31. I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.
Zadie Smith
#32. 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
#33. It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
Zadie Smith
#34. Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk into the blackness.
Zadie Smith
#36. Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives.
Zadie Smith
#37. My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
Zadie Smith
#38. 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
#39. (Feedback) People become addicted to it. That's why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
Zadie Smith
#40. though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other.
Zadie Smith
#41. It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
Zadie Smith
#42. He'd turned to me, red-faced, and asked: 'If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?
Zadie Smith
#43. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.
Zadie Smith
#44. The whole plan's so high on the cheese factor it's practically Stilton
Zadie Smith
#45. 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
#46. Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison.
Zadie Smith
#47. You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
Zadie Smith
#48. I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
Zadie Smith
#50. You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
Zadie Smith
#51. I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
Zadie Smith
#52. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships, Language. Sensibility.
Zadie Smith
#53. Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting.
Zadie Smith
#54. Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.
Zadie Smith
#55. A peculiar idea. Once you're alive in this world, you're responsible." "For
Zadie Smith
#56. The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
Zadie Smith
#57. Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
Zadie Smith
#58. She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance.
Zadie Smith
#59. If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage.
Zadie Smith
#61. for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him.
Zadie Smith
#62. The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
Zadie Smith
#63. I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
Zadie Smith
#64. Yes, sometimes it's the strangers that sustain you.
Zadie Smith
#65. Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
Zadie Smith
#67. To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
Zadie Smith
#68. There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.
Zadie Smith
#69. And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day.
Zadie Smith
#70. It's a question of what love gives you the right to do.
Zadie Smith
#71. 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
#72. Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
Zadie Smith
#73. Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources.
Zadie Smith
#74. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Zadie Smith
#75. 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
#76. It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
Zadie Smith
#77. She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
Zadie Smith
#78. Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other's pockets ... one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to becoming uninvolved.
Zadie Smith
#79. People aren't poor because they make bad choices. They make bad choices because they're poor.
Zadie Smith
#80. A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.
Zadie Smith
#81. And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere.
Zadie Smith
#82. Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Zadie Smith
#83. American houses ... ' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?
Zadie Smith
#85. Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
Zadie Smith
#86. It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
Zadie Smith
#87. The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
Zadie Smith
#88. If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
Zadie Smith
#89. At any time of the day, corduroy is a highly stressful fabric. Rent collectors wear it. Tax collectors, too. History teachers add leather elbow patches.
Zadie Smith
#90. When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark.
Zadie Smith
#91. Sometimes I wonder if people don't want freedom as much as they want meaning.
Zadie Smith
#92. I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
Zadie Smith
#93. Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
Zadie Smith
#94. Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language.
Zadie Smith
#96. Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
Zadie Smith
#97. Getting anything out of my husband is like trying to squeeze water out when you're stoned.
Zadie Smith
#98. The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
Zadie Smith
#99. I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
Zadie Smith
#100. [...] our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.
Zadie Smith
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