Top 300 Zadie Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Zadie Smith

2. “The past is always tense, the future perfect.”

— Zadie Smith

3. “Time is how you spend your love.”

— Zadie Smith

4. “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

10. “It hurts just as much as it is worth.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

12. “An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

14. “You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.”

— Zadie Smith

15. “In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution – is not my solution.”

— Zadie Smith

16. “Don’t live in a way that makes you feel dead.”

— Zadie Smith

17. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

18. “Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

21. “If you’re going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.”

— Zadie Smith

Featured in: Book Quotes

22. “I’m very attracted to exile literature – particularly Nabokov – exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.”

— Zadie Smith

23. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

24. “When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for ‘The Simpsons’ who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.”

— Zadie Smith

25. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

26. “I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

28. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

29. “You can’t state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.”

— Zadie Smith

30. “But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”

— Zadie Smith

31. “Writing is my way of expressing – and thereby eliminating – all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.”

— Zadie Smith

32. “I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.”

— Zadie Smith

33. “I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.”

— Zadie Smith

34. “It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.”

— Zadie Smith

35. “When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.”

— Zadie Smith

36. “Generally, women can’t do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.”

— Zadie Smith

37. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

38. “And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

40. “Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.”

— Zadie Smith

41. “Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.”

— Zadie Smith

42. “Full stories are as rare as honesty.”

— Zadie Smith

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

43. “Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean.” “Another.”

— Zadie Smith

44. “Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don’t join fashionable ‘schools of thought.’ Read everything.”

— Zadie Smith

45. “You say you want to talk, But you don’t. You stonewall me.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

48. “I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.”

— Zadie Smith

49. “A reality shaped around your own desires – there is something sociopathic in that ambition.”

— Zadie Smith

50. “I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I’m not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human – I only love to be so.”

— Zadie Smith