Top 300 Zadie Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment – once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.”

— Zadie Smith

102. “In a whisper he began begging for – and, as the sun set, received – the concession people always beg for: a little more time.”

— Zadie Smith

103. “Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.”

— Zadie Smith

104. “I don’t mean that my mother didn’t love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind. The fundamental skill of all mothers – the management.”

— Zadie Smith

105. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

106. “Well, you can’t make old friends.”

— Zadie Smith

107. “The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.”

— Zadie Smith

108. “She wore her sexuality with an older woman’s ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.”

— Zadie Smith

109. “Jerome said, It’s like, a family doesn’t work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?”

— Zadie Smith

110. “These days, it feels to me like you make a devil’s pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers – who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.”

— Zadie Smith

111. “To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.”

— Zadie Smith

112. “Sometimes I wonder if people don’t want freedom as much as they want meaning.”

— Zadie Smith

113. “But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain. One.”

— Zadie Smith

114. “A dream was a house your brain made without your permission, precisely to preserve memories and experiences and wayward impulses for all eternity, even the dead ones that only caused you pain, the ones from which you most wanted to be free.”

— Zadie Smith

115. “But what does soulful even mean? The dictionary has it this way: “expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling.” The culturally black meaning adds several more shades of color. First shade: soulfulness is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful, creative and self-renewing, and – as it reaches a pitch – ecstatic. It is an alchemy of pain.”

— Zadie Smith

116. “The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.”

— Zadie Smith

117. “It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.”

— Zadie Smith

118. “This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.”

— Zadie Smith

119. “I’m a writer who never writes about sex. It’s so far from my own fictional world.”

— Zadie Smith

120. “We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship... Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”

— Zadie Smith

121. “No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods – come and gone with the sun.”

— Zadie Smith

122. “I always tell my students: “A style is a means of insisting on something.” A line of Sontag’s.”

— Zadie Smith

123. “I wrote ‘White Teeth’ in the late nineties. I didn’t really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.”

— Zadie Smith

124. “Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting.”

— Zadie Smith

125. “I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.”

— Zadie Smith

126. “No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.”

— Zadie Smith

127. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

128. “Don’t confuse honours with achievement.”

— Zadie Smith

129. “I like books that don’t give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.”

— Zadie Smith

130. “Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.”

— Zadie Smith

131. “Maybe it doesn’t matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.”

— Zadie Smith

132. “She did what girls generally do when they don’t feel the part: she dressed it instead.”

— Zadie Smith

133. “Every New Year’s Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature.”

— Zadie Smith

134. “It’s difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.”

— Zadie Smith

135. “No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.” “I.”

— Zadie Smith

136. “Between propriety and joy choose joy.”

— Zadie Smith

137. “He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either.”

— Zadie Smith

138. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

140. “American houses... ′ she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. ‘They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?”

— Zadie Smith

141. “A writer’s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.”

— Zadie Smith

142. “It was a kiss from the past.”

— Zadie Smith

143. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

144. “Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people.”

— Zadie Smith

145. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

146. “I don’t ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man’s question. I ask whom did I live for.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

148. “It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.”

— Zadie Smith

149. “The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn’t matter what the lady believed.”

— Zadie Smith

150. “The fear was respect, the respect, fear. If you didn’t have the fear you had nothing.”

— Zadie Smith