Zadie Smith Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Zadie Smith quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time. — Zadie Smith

Well, you can't make old friends. — Zadie Smith

It was a tough decision.' Mickey crosses his arms and scoffs, 'No such thing, mate. You're either right or you ain't. And — Zadie Smith

Yes, sometimes it's the strangers that sustain you. — Zadie Smith

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

She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her. — Zadie Smith

It was a kiss from the past. — Zadie Smith

Full stories are as rare as honesty. — Zadie Smith

Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And — Zadie Smith

I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not. — Zadie Smith

Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts. — Zadie Smith

Nobody can cast themselves out. — Zadie Smith

Each couple is its own vaudeville act. — Zadie Smith

Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever. — Zadie Smith

That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way. — Zadie Smith

She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence. — Zadie Smith

She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something. — Zadie Smith

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

Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well. — Zadie Smith

I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric. — Zadie Smith

But it's hard, when you're at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others, — Zadie Smith

Sometimes I wonder if people don't want freedom as much as they want meaning. — Zadie Smith

When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion. — Zadie Smith

Ryan is indispensable. There — Zadie Smith

How long that song seemed - longer than life. — Zadie Smith

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

Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy. — Zadie Smith

Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. — Zadie Smith

The future's another country, man ... And I still ain't got a passport. — Zadie Smith

I am very selfish, really. I lived for love. — Zadie Smith

To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated. — Zadie Smith

I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do. — Zadie Smith

Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything. — Zadie Smith

Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting. — Zadie Smith

[he] had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth — Zadie Smith

I do my best work under pressure, so I'll nick an artery, and my husband isn't allowed to stanch the bleeding till I've banged out a chapter. — Zadie Smith

A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor. — Zadie Smith

Nostalgia is a luxury. — Zadie Smith

You're next. It's the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings. — Zadie Smith

He traced the genealogy of the feeling. — Zadie Smith

The shit is not the shit, the pigeon is the shit. — Zadie Smith

Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format? — Zadie Smith

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

Don't confuse honours with achievement. — Zadie Smith

Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people. — Zadie Smith

Getting anything out of my husband is like trying to squeeze water out when you're stoned. — Zadie Smith

Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble. — Zadie Smith

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else. — Zadie Smith

The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential. — Zadie Smith

I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing. — Zadie Smith

We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted. — Zadie Smith

You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can't cross. — Zadie Smith

Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1 — Zadie Smith

[...] our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day. — Zadie Smith

Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting. — Zadie Smith

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

I couldn't afford to be offended. — Zadie Smith

You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me. — Zadie Smith

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. — Zadie Smith

They were touched by the same inheritance. — Zadie Smith

Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby. — Zadie Smith

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories. — Zadie Smith

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

The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation ... — Zadie Smith

Fewer American flags [in Brooklyn] than in Florida but more than in San Francisco. — Zadie Smith

They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow. — Zadie Smith

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships, Language. Sensibility. — Zadie Smith

When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark. — Zadie Smith

When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgement. 'Whatever, — Zadie Smith

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

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world. — Zadie Smith

Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure. — Zadie Smith

That girl,' tutted Alsana as her front door slammed, 'swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time. — Zadie Smith

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed. — Zadie Smith

... maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous ... . - Zadie Smith — Zadie Smith

Magical thinking makes you crazy - and renders everything possible. — Zadie Smith

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free. — Zadie Smith

It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy — Zadie Smith

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

I wanted to love and to be loved. — Zadie Smith

It was a competition in agony. Like rich women in posh restaurants ordering ever-smaller salads. — Zadie Smith

You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal. — Zadie Smith

I was fourteen: the world was pain. — Zadie Smith

The planet is finished with us, at this point - — Zadie Smith

The shit is *not* the shit (this was Mo's mantra,) the *pigeon* is the shit. — Zadie Smith

Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time. — Zadie Smith

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

Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived. — Zadie Smith

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. — Zadie Smith

Faith is hard to achieve, easy to lose. — Zadie Smith

Archie says -Science- the same way he says -Modern-, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them. — Zadie Smith

You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence. — Zadie Smith

Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language. — Zadie Smith

I got something to tell you, said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice. — Zadie Smith

It hurts to look at what you can't have — Zadie Smith

Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like, information ... and if it's God, you've got the wrong house. — Zadie Smith

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

There are so many different ways to be poor, — Zadie Smith

Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. — Zadie Smith

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. — Zadie Smith