Ideas Quotes by Zadie Smith

11 Ideas quotes by Zadie Smith

Smith’s sharp, modern take on thought shines through eleven brief quotes. They provide an accessible entry point to her nuanced perspective on ideas.

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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith

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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have…

Zadie Smith

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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie…

Zadie Smith

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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

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

Zadie Smith

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Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her." "Where you come…

Zadie Smith

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Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes…

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith

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She had that thing most people don't have - curiosity. She might not have always got the right answers, but she wanted…

Zadie Smith

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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki…

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“Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and…

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“I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts--and they never fail to have a…

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

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“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…

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My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that…

Zadie Smith

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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.

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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts,…

Zadie Smith

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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.

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“In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship and Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that…

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I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I…

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“Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish…

Zadie Smith

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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

Zadie Smith

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“(Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term 'middle class'. In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were…

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

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