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Zadie Smith Quotes

English author and academic, Birth: 25-10-1975 Zadie Smith Quotes
1.
You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
Zadie Smith

2.
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

3.
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Zadie Smith

4.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Zadie Smith

5.
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Zadie Smith

Similar Authors: Rush Limbaugh Cassandra Clare Charles Spurgeon Deepak Chopra Stephen King George Bernard Shaw Winston Churchill Neil Gaiman Richelle Mead Jodi Picoult Francois de La Rochefoucauld Marianne Williamson Wayne Dyer Michel de Montaigne Victor Hugo
6.
Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Zadie Smith

7.
Time is how you spend your love.
Zadie Smith

8.
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

Quote Topics by Zadie Smith: Writing People Thinking Book Men Children Believe Lying Past Self Girl Want Ideas Feelings World Trying Pain Different Looks Feels Novel Way Artist Political Mean Years Might Fall Sometimes Moving
9.
I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
Zadie Smith

10.
Don't confuse honours with achievement.
Zadie Smith

11.
Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
Zadie Smith

12.
The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
Zadie Smith

13.
Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
Zadie Smith

14.
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

15.
Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
Zadie Smith

16.
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

17.
The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
Zadie Smith

18.
Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
Zadie Smith

19.
…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith

20.
It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
Zadie Smith

21.
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

22.
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
Zadie Smith

23.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
Zadie Smith

24.
...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Zadie Smith

25.
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.
Zadie Smith

26.
Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
Zadie Smith

27.
I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
Zadie Smith

28.
There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
Zadie Smith

29.
No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
Zadie Smith

30.
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

31.
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Zadie Smith

32.
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

33.
An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
Zadie Smith

34.
The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.
Zadie Smith

35.
You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
Zadie Smith

36.
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith

37.
She had that thing most people don't have - curiosity. She might not have always got the right answers, but she wanted to ask the questions. It's very hard if you are interested in ideas and all that, ideas and the philosophies of the past, it's very hard to find someone around here to really talk to. That's the tragedy of the thing really I mean, when you think about it. Certainly I can't find anyone around here to talk to anymore. And for a woman it's even harder you see. They can feel very trapped - because of the patriarchy. I do feel everyone needs to have these little chats now and then.
Zadie Smith

38.
The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
Zadie Smith

39.
I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
Zadie Smith

40.
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

41.
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
Zadie Smith

42.
The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
Zadie Smith

43.
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
Zadie Smith

44.
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Zadie Smith

45.
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

46.
It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
Zadie Smith

47.
But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.
Zadie Smith

48.
Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
Zadie Smith

49.
I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
Zadie Smith

50.
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
Zadie Smith