Zadie Smith Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

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

Zadie Smith
Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?

Zadie Smith
I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

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

Zadie Smith
It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.

Zadie Smith
Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.

Zadie Smith
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
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
It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

Zadie Smith
Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her." "Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea.

Zadie Smith
His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out.

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
Some people—Samad for example—will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase "at the end of the day"—football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds—but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals.

Zadie Smith
… dressed all in yellow spreading warmth and the promise of sex.

Zadie Smith
Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.

Zadie Smith
I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.

Zadie Smith
Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical.

Zadie Smith
You don't have favorites among your children but you do have allies.

Zadie Smith
Writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault.

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

Zadie Smith
This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?

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

Zadie Smith
I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

Zadie Smith
Surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

Zadie Smith
She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.

Zadie Smith
Any collective term for a supposed literary movement is always too large a net, catching significant dolphins among so much cannable tuna. You cannot place first-time novelists with literary giants, New York hipsters with Kilburn losers, and some of the writers who got caught up with me are undeserving of the criticism.

Zadie Smith