Zadie Smith quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Zadie Smith on Wise Famous Quotes.

But why think the more reasons there were to sin, the smaller the sin was?

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

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt
something is gained but something is lost.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources.

The Noted Activist

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

I want to stay still and to keep moving. I want this life and another.

I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.

Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti

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

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

A peculiar idea. Once you're alive in this world, you're responsible." "For

Nobody can cast themselves out.

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

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

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.

Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?

The wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space.

We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.

Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

In a whisper he began begging for - and, as the sun set, received - the concession people always beg for: a little more time.

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.

I felt a wonderful lightness in my body, a ridiculous happiness, it seemed to come from nowhere.

(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)

She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she'd ever meant by the word.

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

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

Kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement.

Beggars cannot be choosers.

She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive.

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.

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money.

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.

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.

Pulchritude
beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

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

There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.

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

All tastes are expressions of belief.

It was the same now. Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia.

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

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

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.

The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

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.

This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

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

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.

Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison.

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.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood.

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

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.

A different kind of history from my mother's, the kind that is barely written down - that is felt.

Nostalgia is a luxury.

There are so many different ways to be poor,

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

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

When all the time it was that grand tree, taking up half the garden with its roots and not allowing anything else to grow.

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

He traced the genealogy of the feeling.

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

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

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

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

Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.

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

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

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

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

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

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.

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

One just has to look at the thing from a perspective that interests you personally.

He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.

Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us.

Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.

While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.

The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.

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.

Grass can be seen, although it is important not to

I didn't understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom.

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

Everybody's got their tribe. Whose tribe are you in anyway?

Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.

The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

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

but to create a real feeling - made

Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.

but that coldness stopped up the sentence in my mouth. "What

The whole plan's so high on the cheese factor it's practically Stilton