Zadie Smith Quotes

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.

Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk into the blackness.

can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize?

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity ... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation ...

He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people's jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered.

He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism was a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do until they've sunk five pints. I don't think anybody should give themselves air just because they don't have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don't think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you're an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don't fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture - that just won't do it.

Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old.

I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.

I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

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

The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.

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

And I'm not going to get any thinner or any younger, my ass is going to hit the ground, if it hasn't already
and I want to be with somebody who can still see me in here. I'm still in here. And I don't want to be resented or despised for changing ... I'd rather be alone.

Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity.

Don't you think they're as bored as you are? You think you're somebody special? You think I wake up everyday so happy to see you? You're a snob, just in the other way. Do you think you are the only one who wants something else? Another life?

It's a question of what love gives you the right to do.

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.

English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.

Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you.

Fewer American flags [in Brooklyn] than in Florida but more than in San Francisco.

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

Ryan is indispensable. There

And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass.

A little white woman, . . . [a] tiny little white woman I could fit in my pocket.' . . . 'And I don't know why I'm surprised. You don't even notice it – you never notice. You think it's normal. Everywhere we go, I'm alone in this… this sea of white. I barely know any black folk any more, Howie. My whole life is white. I don't see any black folk unless they be cleaning under my feet in the fucking café in your fucking college. Or pushing a fucking hospital bed through a corridor . . . 'I gave up my life for you. I don't even know who I am any more.' . . . 'Could you have found anybody less like me if you'd scoured the earth? . . . My leg weighs more than that woman. What have you made me look like in front of everybody in this town? You married a big black bitch and you run off with a fucking leprechaun?

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

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

She was in breach of that feminine law that states that no weakness may be shown by a woman to another woman without a sacrifice of equal value being made in return.

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.

He's one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is 'noble'. Howard didn't much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers.

Bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one's cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.

then after a few miles you arrived at a new idea, that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness - or potential for goodness - a person possessed.

If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. 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.

And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day.

It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read the New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with the New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: the New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps attacking, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context.

You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.

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

It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed onto the boundary wall of Caldwell, she was compelled to walk the entire wall, no matter the obstructions in her path (beer cans, branches). This compulsion, applied to other fields, manifested itself as "intelligence." Every unknown word sent her to a dictionary--in search of something like "completion"--and every book led to another book, a process that, of course, could never be completed. This route through early life gave her no small portion of joy, and, indeed, it seemed at first that her desires and her capacities were basically aligned. She wanted to read things--could not resist wanting to read things--and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn't it possible that what others mistook for intelligence was in fact only a sort of mutation of the will?

I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.

It seems to me," said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, "that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.

though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other.

Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts; ... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.

for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him.

How long that song seemed - longer than life.

I don't want your babies, Felix. I can assure you I'm not sitting up here like some tragic fallen woman every night dreaming of having your babies." She began tracing a figure of eight with her fingernail along his stomach. The movement looked idle but the nail pressed in hard. "You realize of course that if it were the other way round there would be a law, there would be an actual law: John versus Jen in the high court. And John would put it to Jen that she did wilfully fuck him for five years, before dumping him without warning in the twilight of his procreative window, and taking up with young Jack-the-lad, only twenty-four years old and with a cock as long as my arm. The court rules in favor of John. Every time. Jen must pay damages. Huge sums. Plus six months in jail. No - nine. Poetic justice.

I was fourteen: the world was pain.

The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.

For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood.

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.

More silence; children's silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator.

I'm serious. I don't know how you work like that. My school shit is better organized, and I'm not in the business of World Domination.

Archie's marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home, and finding they don't fit.

Some people
Samad for example
will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase "at the end of the day"
football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds
but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals.

Back then, we were all still willing to take the "risk," if "risk" is the right word to describe entering into the lives of others, not merely in symbol but in reality.

You're next. It's the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings.

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.

The whole plan's so high on the cheese factor it's practically Stilton

I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It's a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that's the deal: you have to live; you can't live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It's the easy way out.

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

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

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

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

The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.

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

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

I got something to tell you, said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice.

All tastes are expressions of belief.

The only thing to see is the obligatory third-world Coke billboard, ironic in exact proportion to the distance from its proper American context. This one says COKE - MAKE IT REAL. Just after the Coke sign there is a contrary sign, an indication that irony is not a currency in Liberia. It is worn by a girl who leans against the exit in a T-shirt that says THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD.

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

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.

Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She's not the kind of person who leaves your life when she's in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business...it just goes.

You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.

(Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term 'middle class'. In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say.)

It hurts just as much as it is worth.

Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language.

Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of "fittingness": that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it
no matter how small or insignificant both might be
are matched exactly, are fitting. This, Claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful ... In Claire's presence, you were not faulty or badly designed, no, not at all. You were the fitting receptacle and instrument of your talents and beliefs and desires.

It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants––packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends––that stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.

Yes, sometimes it's the strangers that sustain you.

Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power - local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic - on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine. I waited for whatever cathartic feeling people hope to experience in such places, but I couldn't make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere, this just happened to be where they'd placed the monument. I gave up and went in search of Lamin.

People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it's over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there's no down time.

I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy's screwy - cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.

The wind picked up, shaking the trees below. She had the sense of being in the country. In the country, if a woman could not face her children, or her friends, or her family – if she were covered in shame – she would probably only need to lay herself down in a field and take her leave by merging, first with the grass underneath her, then with the mulch under that. A city child, Natalie Blake had always been naive about country matters. Still, when it came to the city, she was not mistaken. Here nothing less than a break – a sudden and total rupture – would do.

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.

Poverty is not just a headline, my love, it's a lived reality, on the ground - and education is at the heart of it." "I

Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don't, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It's not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that.

Even by the standards with which she is familiar, Liberia is exceptional. "Three quarters of the population live below the poverty line - that's one U.S. dollar a day - half are on less than fifty cents a day. What infrastructure there was has been destroyed - roads, ports, municipal electricity, water, sanitation, schools, hospitals - all desperately lacking or nonexistent; eighty-six-percent unemployment, no street lights. . . .

And it's time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings.

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do.

When my little group get together, if we disagree about something, we can sort it out. Example: Mohona Hossain hates Divargiit Singh. Hates all his movies. Hates him with a passion. She likes that other fool with the eyelashes like a lady! But we compromise. Never once have I burned a single video of hers.

This because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England's got to give.

Involved. At least that was the right word, Alsana reflected, as she liftes her foot off the pedal, and let the wheel spin a few times alone before coming to a squeaky halt. Sometimes, here in England, especially at bus-stops and on the daytime soaps, you heard people say "We're involved with each other," as if this were a most wonderful state to be in, as if one chose it and enjoyed it. Alsana never thought of it that way. Involved happened over a long period of time, pulling you in like quicksand. Involved is what befell the moon-faced Alsana Begum and the handsome Samad Miah one week after they'd been pushed into a Delhi breakfast room together and informed they were to marry. Involved was the result when Clara Bowden met Archie Jones at the bottom of some stairs. Involved swallowed up a girl called Ambrosia and a boy called Charlie (yes, Clara had told her that sorry tale) the second they kissed in the larder of a guest house. Involved is neither good, nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other's pockets… one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to being uninvolved. And the woman was right, one didn't do it for one's health. Nothing this late in the century was done with health in mind. Alsana was no dummy when it came to the Modern Condition. She watched the talk shows, all day long she watched the talk shows - My wife slept with my brother, My mother won't stay out

It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.

The wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.