Zadie Smith Quotes

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

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.

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

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

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

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.

Time is how you spend your love.

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

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

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

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

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

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.

Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.

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

An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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'?

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.

Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.

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

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

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.

Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.

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.

Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

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.

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

The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.

Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]