Zadie Smith Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Zadie Smith 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.
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt
something is gained but something is lost.
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.
I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.
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'?
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.
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.
(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)
Kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement.
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.
beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like, information ... and if it's God, you've got the wrong house.
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.
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.