Zadie Smith

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

— Zadie Smith

“It hurts to look at what you can't have”

— Zadie Smith

Each couple is its own vaudeville act.

— Zadie Smith

“I wanted to love and to be loved.”

— Zadie Smith

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

— Zadie Smith

“We are split people.”

— Zadie Smith

“Nobody can cast themselves out.”

— Zadie Smith

Time is how you spend your love.

— Zadie Smith

“Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

She loved you in the morning because the day was new.

— Zadie Smith

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

— Zadie Smith

“While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.”

— Zadie Smith

“But why think the more reasons there were to sin, the smaller the sin was?”

— Zadie Smith

Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large…

— Zadie Smith

Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn…

— Zadie Smith

“It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers---women are used to it. Men…

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me,…

— Zadie Smith

I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the…

— Zadie Smith

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious…

— Zadie Smith

Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.

— Zadie Smith

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation…

— Zadie Smith

I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and…

— Zadie Smith

He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he…

— Zadie Smith

It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just…

— Zadie Smith

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in…

— Zadie Smith

I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in…

— Zadie Smith

“Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all…

— Zadie Smith

A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's…

— Zadie Smith

“The idea of forming people out of grammatical clauses seems so fantastical at the start that you hide your terror in a…

— Zadie Smith

“What?" asked Natalie Blake. She really was too drunk to return to chambers. Her friend Layla was smiling, a little sadly. She…

— Zadie Smith

“Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language.…

— Zadie Smith

“begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see…

— Zadie Smith

“But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching…

— Zadie Smith

I was thinking about the generation before us, like John Barth and all of those pomo dudes who had that idea of,…

— Zadie Smith

“Writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka.…

— Zadie Smith

I was brought up with the sense that I was absolutely no different from my brothers. I went to college thinking I…

— Zadie Smith