Zadie Smith Quotes

Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship...

It's like that quote: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I ho...

More silence; children's silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

[..] as midnight inevitably came and went without the horsemen of the apocalypse making an appearanc...

Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me."Whatever was told to Zinat i...

He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no s...

A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his...

And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and ...

That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a ...

Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl'...

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

It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual spring fair full of beans, help with the r...

Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting.

By Allah, how _thankful_ he is (_yes, madam, one moment, madam_), how _gladdened_ by the thought tha...

One just has to look at the thing from a perspective that interests you personally.

These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand ov...

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

But dying is no easy trick. And suicide can't be put on a list of Things To Do in between cleaning t...

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

We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with legs crossed, letting the thi...

Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They want...

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

Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with ...

When my little group get together, if we disagree about something, we can sort it out. Example: Moho...

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the gr...

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

Full stories are as rare as honesty.

I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE ...

Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. N...

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

That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe...

You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.

They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, althou...

Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so ...

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

They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that ne...

On BeautyNo, we could not itemize the listof sins they can't forgive us.The beautiful don't lack the...

- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightsh...

They caught up with each other's news casually, leaving long, cosy gaps of silence in which to go to...

People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sittin...

A little white woman, . . . [a] tiny little white woman I could fit in my pocket.’ . . . ‘And I don’...

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

This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-...

The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.

USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. S...

Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why ...

I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.

She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on th...

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

They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It w...

American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem...

Those are my bougainvillea—I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive...

The planet is finished with us, at this point -

Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than the...

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

Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what...

There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the r...

I don’t want your babies, Felix. I can assure you I’m not sitting up here like some tragic fallen wo...

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

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is ...

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Ot...

It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concr...

I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed ...

And it's time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They...

But these people _announced_ their madness . . . they flaunted their insanity, they weren't half mad...

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of eli...

But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the hig...

My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sen...

As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-q...

A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the ...

All tastes are expressions of belief.

Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for wh...

And I'm not going to get any thinner or any younger, my ass is going to hit the ground, if it hasn't...

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it.

My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's...

(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to he...

There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key wa...

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found ...

I want to stay still and to keep moving. I want this life and another.

She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how ...

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everythin...

You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a ...

You don’t come to live here [New York City] unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own ...

To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was ...

He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical polit...

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality...

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on f...

A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very e...

I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the ...

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong s...

Time is how you spend your love.

Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the...

It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed ont...

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that i...

The wind picked up, shaking the trees below. She had the sense of being in the country. In the count...

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's...

In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel...

Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost ev...

I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.