Quotes from Zadie Smith

There was something wonderful about being near her, she cut every situation to her own dimension, believed she could adapt anything until it suited, even as flexibility fell out of fashion.

She wanted to check that it was not her imagination, that she was not being unfair or undemocratic, or worse still racist (but she had read Colour Blind, a seminal leaflet from the Rainbow Coalition, she had scored well on the self-test), racist in ways that were so deeply ingrained and socially determining that they escaped her attention.

You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it's not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who's read it in twelve different versions. It's the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.

In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and colour, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

The baby was presented to me, to all of us, as a fait accompli, a legal adoption, suggested and agreed upon by the parents, and nobody questioned this, or not out loud. No one asked what "agreement" could even mean in a situation of such deep imbalance.

He was no great believer in destiny, Archie, but on reflection it did seem that a special effort of predestination had ensured his life had been picked out for him like a company Christmas present - early, and the same as everyone else's.

Our external tubular heating system, painted in garish primary colors, looked like a poor man's Pompidou.

The middle-class left so delights in being right! And so much of the disenfranchised working class has chosen to be flagrantly, shamelessly wrong.

His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out, and The Faith of Jamaicans was soon replaced in the inverse sieve of his consciousness by other interests: The Excitability of the Military Hindoo; The Impracticalities of the English Virgin; The Effect of Extreme Heat on the Sexual Proclivities of the Trinidadian.

Everybody's path crossed with hers at the same moment, as soon as she emerged she was uncontained by space and time, with not one path to cross but all paths—they were all hers, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, all ways were her way—and of course millions of people felt as I did.

You came in with a picky head, uneven and coarse, disguised underneath a baseball cap, and you left swiftly afterwards a new man, smelling sweetly of coconut oil and with a cut as sharp and clean as a swear word.

She accepts everything that has happened to her as her destiny, no more surprised or alienated to be who she is than I imagine Cleopatra was to be Cleopatra. I

when she'd finished she would give one of four possible judgments. "Zippy"—which was good; "Important"—which was very good; "Controversial"—which could be either good or bad, you never knew; or "Lidderary," which was pronounced with a sigh and an eye roll and was very bad.

Now, every time I learn something more about him, I like him less. So you see, we were better off the way we were.

How many times,' Samad growled, after watching his son purchase the autobiography of Malcolm X, 'is it necessary to say thank you in a single transaction? Thank you when you hand the book over, thank you when she receives it, thank you when she tells you the price, thank you when you sign the cheque, thank you when she takes it! They call it English politeness when it is simply arrogance. The only being who deserves this kind of thanks is Allah himself!

A superstar takes everybody everywhere. "What

Not even the Catholics would forgive them for it (and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate politicians give out promises and whores give out)

Big words. But how fragile is Clara's atheism! Like one of those tiny glass doves Hortense keeps in the lounge cabinet – a breath would knock it over.

Mum, you just said it yourself: you can't save everybody. She nodded several times and brought a napkin to her damp cheeks. That's true, she said. Very true. But at the same time, can't you always do more?

the surest motivation I know, the one I feel deepest within myself, and which, when all is said, done, stripped away - as it is at the moment - seems to be at the truth of the matter for a lot of people, to wit: it's something to do. [...] Why did you bake that banana bread? It was something to do. Why did you make a fort in your living room? Well, it's something to do. Why dress the dog as a cat? It's something to do, isn't it? Fills the time.

saw all my years at once, but they were not piled up on each other, experience after experience, building into something of substance—the opposite. A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn't rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship.

In a fit of nostalgia, and because he was the only man Samad knew on this little island, Samad had sought Archie out, moved into the same London borough. And slowly but surely a kind of friendship was being rekindled between the two men. 'You play like a faggot,' said Samad

Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.