Quotes from Zadie Smith

Perhaps all this displacement of anxiety into the physical realm was a feminine way of simplifying a far deeper and more insoluble difference, for Natalie believed Tonya had a gift for living and Natalie herself did not seem to have this gift.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as 'natural' or 'inevitable' – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages.

When money's scarce life is a daily emergency, everything is freighted with potential loss, you feel even the smallest misstep will destroy you. When there's money, it's different, even a real emergency never quite touches you, you're always shielded from risk. You are, in some sense, too big to fail.

When I was a kid, I thought I'd rather be a brain in a jar than a "natural woman." I have turned out to be some odd combination of both, from moment to moment, and with no control over when and where or why those moments occur.

I want to stay still and to keep moving. I want this life and another. Don't look for me!

He had an absolute empathy for everybody, Magid. And it was an unbelievable pain in the arse.

Public art claiming to represent our collective memory is just as often a work of historical erasure and political manipulation. It is just as often the violent inscription of myth over truth, a form of "over-writing"—one story overlaid and thus obscuring another—modeled in three dimensions

See what you've done there is you've transformed an act of the perpetrator into another person's being. I said, You don't say to a witch: the reason they're dunking you is because you're a witch. You say, the reason they're dunking you is these motherfuckers believe in witchcraft!

He] looked troubled, for he had strayed too far from small talk right to the center of things--it happened more and more these days--and now must try to return to the things that didn't matter.

People were not people but merely an effect of language. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence

He peered down the hallway at the shadowy form of Joyce through the glass and scratched his testicles, sadly.

Janet Jackson kicked off this curious phenomenon, Madonna continued it, Beyoncé is its apex. Here dancing is intended as a demonstration of the female will, a concrete articulation of its reach and possibilities. The lesson is quite clear. My body obeys me. My dancers obey me. Now you will obey me.

The happy ending is never universal. Someone is always left behind.

De fapt, în mintea mea, era în acelaÈ™i timp pe de-a-ntregul adev?rat È™i evident o minciun?, È™i poate numai copiii sunt în stare s? accepte asemenea adev?ruri cu dou? feÈ›e.

Be completely fearless. [...]Write without constraints, or worrying about who you represent, or whether you should represent anyone, or who your audience is, or what you can or can't do with a female character, or a black character, or someone of restricted growth, or someone who's hugely fat. You must write total confidence that the fiction is its own justification.

Ryan is indispensable. There

Like millions of British people, we paid our taxes in the hope that they would be used to establish shared institutions from which all might benefit equally.

After all, you can storm the house of a novel like Barthes, rearranging the furniture as you choose, or you can enter on your knees, like the pilgrim Nabokov thought you were, and try to figure out the cunning design of the place - the house will stand either way.

England is not warmer than New England in July or August, that's true. Probably not in June either. But it is warmer in October, November, December, January, February, March, April and May - that is, in every month when warmth matters.

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls.

Clarence, look see! It de young prince in white. 'Im come to play domino. I jus' look in his eye and I and I knew 'im play domino. 'Im an hexpert.

Hey! 'Hey!' But there was no name to put on the end of Hey and a six foot two black man shouting Hey in a dense crowd does not create easiness wherever he goes.

My children know the truth about me but still tolerate me, so far.

In a flood the water goes everywhere, you don't have to think about it. In a drought, if you want water, you have to direct it carefully along each inch of its path.