Zadie Smith Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Zadie Smith.
Famous Quotes By Zadie Smith
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt
something is gained but something is lost. — Zadie Smith
As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues. — Zadie Smith
Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know? — Zadie Smith
Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as I do, and might be happy to tag along with me on this search for clarity, for precision. I love that aspect of writing. Nothing makes me happier than to hear a reader say: that's just what I've always felt, but you said it clearly. — Zadie Smith
He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people's jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. — Zadie Smith
But singing isn't just about belting it out, is it? It's not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it's about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don't you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in? — Zadie Smith
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
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'? — Zadie Smith
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
And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time. — Zadie Smith
Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, center stage, for all to see. — Zadie Smith
People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive — Zadie Smith
We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention. — Zadie Smith
I felt a wonderful lightness in my body, a ridiculous happiness, it seemed to come from nowhere. — Zadie Smith
(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
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
But as the prey evolves (and we are prey to the Mad who are pursuing us, desperate to impart their own brand of truth to the hapless commuter) so does the hunter, and the true professionals begin to tire of that old catchphrase "What you looking at?" begin to tire of that old catchphrase "What you looking at?" and move into more exotic territory. Take Mad Mary. Oh, the principle's still the same, it's still all about eye contact and the danger of making it, but now she's making eye contact from a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred yards away, and if she catches you doing the same she roars down the street, dreads and feathers and cape afloat, Hoodoo stick in hand, until she gets to where you are, spits on you, and begins. — Zadie Smith
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
Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of "fittingness": that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it
no matter how small or insignificant both might be
are matched exactly, are fitting. This, Claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful ... In Claire's presence, you were not faulty or badly designed, no, not at all. You were the fitting receptacle and instrument of your talents and beliefs and desires. — 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
Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old. — Zadie Smith
People aren't poor because they make bad choices. They make bad choices because they're poor. — Zadie Smith
Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. — Zadie Smith
'this is real. This life. We're really here - this is really happening. Suffering is real. When you hurt people, it's real. When you fuck one of our best friends, that's a real thing and it hurts me. — Zadie Smith
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
The only thing to see is the obligatory third-world Coke billboard, ironic in exact proportion to the distance from its proper American context. This one says COKE - MAKE IT REAL. Just after the Coke sign there is a contrary sign, an indication that irony is not a currency in Liberia. It is worn by a girl who leans against the exit in a T-shirt that says THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD. — Zadie Smith
Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She's not the kind of person who leaves your life when she's in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business...it just goes. — Zadie Smith
There is a connection between boredom and the desire for chaos. Despite many disguises and bluffs perhaps she had never stopped wanting chaos. — Zadie Smith
Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money. — Zadie Smith
Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you. — Zadie Smith
Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over irie, was that it sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings. Like the first morning of Eden and the day after apocalypse. A blank page. (p.332) — Zadie Smith
Actually creating an animal just so it can die -- it's like being God! I mean personally I'm a Hindu, yeah? I'm not religious or nothing, but you know, I believe in the sanctity of life, yeah? And these people, like, program the mouse, plot its every move, yeah, when it's going to have kids, when it's going to die. It's just unnatural. — Zadie Smith
I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it ... I should be loving sculpture! But I have not gone deeply into sculpture. Instead, having been utterly insensitive to sculpture, I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space. — Zadie Smith
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. — Zadie Smith
And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive. — Zadie Smith
The shit is not the shit, he repeated solemnly, the pigeon is the shit. — Zadie Smith
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
The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students. — Zadie Smith
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
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
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
Beggars cannot be choosers. — Zadie Smith
things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth. Our — 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
They caught up with each other's news casually, leaving long, cosy gaps of silence in which to go to work on their muffins and coffees. Jerome - after two months of having to be witty and brilliant in a strange town among strangers - appreciated the gift of it. People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this too was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. ~ on the comforts of home. — Zadie Smith
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
You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can't cross. — Zadie Smith
All tastes are expressions of belief. — Zadie Smith
Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [ ... ] — Zadie Smith
All day long I can look forward to a popsicle. — Zadie Smith
Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite? — Zadie Smith
No, Keeks - this is a good thing. It's been hell - I know it has. But I don't want to be without ... us. You;re the person I - you're my life, Keeks. You have been and you will be and you are. i don't know how you want me to say it. You're for me - you are me. We've always known that - and there's no way out now anyway. I love you. You're for me. — Zadie Smith
How long that song seemed - longer than life. — Zadie Smith
She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she'd ever meant by the word. — Zadie Smith
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
I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to. — 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
or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth. — Zadie Smith
Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby. — Zadie Smith
Then, cutting across it all like a stick through the sand, a child's voice wailed, an acute, high-pitched sound, such as a small animal makes when, out of sheer boredom, you break its leg. — Zadie Smith
And so if we want to see real change in this world, she continued, adjusting the incline on her running machine until I, who walked on a neighboring one, seemed to be watching her dash up the side of Kilimanjaro, well, then we ourselves have to be the ones to do it, yes, we have to be the change we want to see. By "we" she meant people like herself, of financial means and global reach, who happen to love freedom and equality, want justice, feel an obligation to do something good with their own good fortune. — Zadie Smith
The shit is not the shit, the pigeon is the shit. — Zadie Smith
I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, "Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing - loads of Indian people." To which you want to reply, "Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing - loads of white people. — Zadie Smith
My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own. — Zadie Smith
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
We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with legs crossed, letting the things that are beyond my control wash over me. But the other half wants to fight a holy war. Jihad! And certainly we could argue this out in the street, but I think, in the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution
it is not my solution. So I do not know what it is you would like me to say. Truth and firmness is one suggestion, though there are many people you can ask if that answer does not satisfy. Personally, my hope lies in the last days. The prophet Muhammad
peace be upon Him!
tells us that on the Day of Resurrection everyone will be struck unconscious. Deaf and dumb. No chitchat. Tongueless. And what a bloody relief that will be. — Zadie Smith
The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd. — Zadie Smith
A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal. — Zadie Smith
English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control. — Zadie Smith
She loved you in the morning because the day was new. — 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
She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence. — Zadie Smith
Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel. — Zadie Smith
And before there was Clara and Archie there was Clara and Ryan. And there is no getting away from Ryan Topps. Just as a good historian need recognize Hitler's Napoleonic ambitions in the east in order to comprehend his reluctance to invade the British in the west, so Ryan Topps is essential to any understanding of why Clara did what she did. Ryan is indispensable. — Zadie Smith
It hurts to look at what you can't have — Zadie Smith
I didn't understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom. — Zadie Smith
She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive. — 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
So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past. — Zadie Smith
I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts
and they never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about the opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English civil war, of French wines
I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time? — 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
The past is always tense, the future perfect. — Zadie Smith
She was a woman still controlled by the traumas of her girlhood. It made more sense to put her three-year-old self in the dock. As Dr Byford explained, she was really the victim of a vicious, peculiarly female psycological disorder: she felt one thing and did another. She was a stranger to herself.
And were they still like that, she wondered - these new girls, this new generation? Did they still feel one thing and do another? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire instead of - as Howard might put it - desiring subjects? No, she could see no serious change. Still starving themselves, still reading women's magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can't be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything. — Zadie Smith
This was one of the little ways in which he said sorry. They were meant to add up each day. — Zadie Smith
People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel
before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away. — Zadie Smith
At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls. — Zadie Smith
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
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
Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison. — 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
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
She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead. — Zadie Smith
Cigarettes took them to medals, which took them to guns, which took them to radios, which took them to jeeps. By midnight, Samad had won three jeeps, seven guns, fourteen medals, the land attached to Gozan's sister's house, and an IOU for four horses, three chickens and a duck. — Zadie Smith