Quotes from Zadie Smith

Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean." "Another

Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.

When everyone's building a fence, isn't it a true fool who lives out in the open?

the feeling I had of moving into somebody else's broken ambition.

The story of Janie's progress through three marriages confronts the reader with the significant idea that the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another (or one woman and another) stretches beyond romance. It is, in the end, the choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes, arguments (shared concepts that fit the world as you experience it), languages (shared words that fit the world as you believe it to be) and lives.

I worked regularly and kept a journal; I saw that creation was an accretive process which couldn't be hurried, and which involved patience and, primarily, love. I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through.

Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.

Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people.

They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.

And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Bookshop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides--no matter what Brent Council may claim--an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: 'Giving the people what they didn't know they wanted.' Important category.

I don't mean that my mother didn't love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind. The fundamental skill of all mothers—the management

Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti

How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably?

I am not as ingenious as these people. No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.

I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.

Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.

When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes.

But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes.

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

Maybe nothing that happens upon stolen ground can expect a happy ending.

The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.

While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie. Somewhere, somehow, by somebody it had been decided that he would live.

You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.