Zadie Smith Quotes

English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.

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

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.

I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.

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.

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

Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.

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

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'

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

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

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.

The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.

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. Such is life.

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

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

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

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?

All tastes are expressions of belief.

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.

Full stories are as rare as honesty.

She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

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

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.

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

Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.

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.

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.

The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.

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

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

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

'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

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

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

She loved you in the morning because the day was new.

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.

It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.