Zadie Smith Quotes

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

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

It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy

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

Each couple is its own vaudeville act.

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

It was a kiss from the past.

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.

When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.

When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.

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

For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

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.

I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

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

When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, "Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure."

I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.

He traced the genealogy of the feeling.

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?

The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.

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

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.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

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

I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.

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.

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

Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.

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

You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

You're a library of me.

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.

I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.

I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.

It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.

One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.

[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.

Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.

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.

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

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

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