Top 300 Zadie Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Each couple is its own vaudeville act.”

— Zadie Smith

52. “It’s got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can’t get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people’s minds. I can’t live my life like that.”

— Zadie Smith

53. “People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.”

— Zadie Smith

54. “A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end – he will kill. Make no mistake. He won’t let the new order roll over him without a struggle.”

— Zadie Smith

55. “Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.”

— Zadie Smith

56. “The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.”

— Zadie Smith

57. “I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.”

— Zadie Smith

58. “There’s never any knowing – how am I to put it? – which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever. – E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread.”

— Zadie Smith

59. “All tastes are expressions of belief.”

— Zadie Smith

60. “The nineties, ecstatic decade!”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

62. “We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.”

— Zadie Smith

63. “I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.”

— Zadie Smith

64. “She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India.”

— Zadie Smith

65. “It’s gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.”

— Zadie Smith

66. “Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.”

— Zadie Smith

67. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

69. “Can’t a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?”

— Zadie Smith

70. “She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something.”

— Zadie Smith

71. “Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.”

— Zadie Smith

72. “Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.”

— Zadie Smith

73. “Novels are not about expressing yourself, they’re about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.”

— Zadie Smith

74. “They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.”

— Zadie Smith

75. “Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we’re also dark people with dark thoughts.”

— Zadie Smith

76. “She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.”

— Zadie Smith

77. “It’s easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy.”

— Zadie Smith

78. “Desperation, weakness, vulnerability – these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.”

— Zadie Smith

79. “Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.”

— Zadie Smith

80. “We worried for her. We tend to assume the worst, here in Willesden. We watched her watching the shuttlecock. Pock, smash. Pock, smash. As if one player could imagine only a violent conclusion and the other only a hopeful return.”

— Zadie Smith

81. “On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.”

— Zadie Smith

82. “No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs – this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.”

— Zadie Smith

83. “For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt – something is gained but something is lost.”

— Zadie Smith

84. “When people use that stream of consciousness, it’s kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.”

— Zadie Smith

85. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

86. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

87. “He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.”

— Zadie Smith

88. “Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it’s Allah’s turn or his own.”

— Zadie Smith

89. “Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.”

— Zadie Smith

90. “Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.”

— Zadie Smith

91. “Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

93. “You don’t have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.”

— Zadie Smith

94. “And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.”

— Zadie Smith

95. “Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people’s things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what’s coming, sooner or later.”

— Zadie Smith

96. “But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.”

— Zadie Smith

97. “Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.”

— Zadie Smith

98. “I love to dance, and sing – in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing – dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.”

— Zadie Smith

99. “It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.”

— Zadie Smith

100. “The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.”

— Zadie Smith