Top 300 Zadie Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn’t feel this way?”

— Zadie Smith

302. “Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.”

— Zadie Smith

303. “It was like tag, but a girl was never “It,” only boys were “It,” girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top.”

— Zadie Smith

304. “Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I’ve done it all my life.”

— Zadie Smith

305. “The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real world person called Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

307. “You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.”

— Zadie Smith

308. “I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.”

— Zadie Smith

309. “But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?”

— Zadie Smith

310. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

311. “A minute later, the young Turk and Howard parted on frosty terms, not much warmed by Howard’s twenty-pence tip, the only extra change he had in his pocket. It is on journeys like this – where one is so horribly misunderstood – that you find yourself longing for home, that place where you are entirely understood, for better or for worse.”

— Zadie Smith

312. “There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with.”

— Zadie Smith

313. “I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. “You.”

— Zadie Smith

314. “I worked regularly and kept a journal; I saw that creation was an accretive process which couldn’t be hurried, and which involved patience and, primarily, love. I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through.”

— Zadie Smith

315. “The fundamental skill of all mothers – the management of time – was beyond her. She measured time in pages.”

— Zadie Smith

316. “Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.”

— Zadie Smith

317. “The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn’t doubt was the real one, but which I couldn’t ‘speak to,’ to use a favorite phrase of his.”

— Zadie Smith

318. “Here’s the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth. Condemned cliques become halcyon “movements” annoying young men, august geniuses.”

— Zadie Smith

319. “It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers – women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance.”

— Zadie Smith

320. “Since that moment, one form of crisis has collided with another, and I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book. But I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.”

— Zadie Smith

321. “Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses – a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame – will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.”

— Zadie Smith

322. “People find themselves applauding a national health service that their own government criminally underfunded and neglected these past ten years. People thank God for ‘essential’ workers they once considered lowly, who not so long ago they despised for wanting fifteen bucks an hour.”

— Zadie Smith

323. “There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.”

— Zadie Smith

324. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

325. “To the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.”

— Zadie Smith

326. “The only force comparable to an Ainsworth enthusiasm was the speed with which it passed.”

— Zadie Smith

327. “Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them.”

— Zadie Smith

328. “We don’t always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We don’t have to take it personally. We can also just let it be.”

— Zadie Smith

329. “And yet, in my case, I can’t let it go: old habits die hard. I can’t rid myself of the need to do “something,” to make “something,” to feel that this new expanse of time hasn’t been “wasted.” Still, it’s nice to have company. Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do “something,” that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.”

— Zadie Smith

330. “Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.”

— Zadie Smith

331. “Time is not what it is but how it is felt...”

— Zadie Smith

332. “War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate. People find themselves applauding a national health service that their own government criminally underfunded and neglected these past ten years. People thank God for “essential” workers they once considered lowly, who not so long ago they despised for wanting fifteen bucks an hour.”

— Zadie Smith

333. “Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, it’s an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world – and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand – than by those surrounded by “loved ones”.”

— Zadie Smith