People Quotes by Zadie Smith

“We are split people.”

— Zadie Smith

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

— Zadie Smith

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.

— Zadie Smith

Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.

— Zadie Smith

People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it's over on the dot. You immediately have to go into…

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.

— Zadie Smith

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to…

— Zadie Smith

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other…

— 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

Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of…

— Zadie Smith

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

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in…

— Zadie Smith

I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest…

— Zadie Smith

In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I'm thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with…

— Zadie Smith

I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was…

— Zadie Smith

My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not…

— Zadie Smith

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here,…

— Zadie Smith

... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by…

— Zadie Smith

A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same…

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

150 years ago in [Charles] Dickens's time there was at least a sense of craft. So some of the things people had…

— Zadie Smith

This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's…

— Zadie Smith

Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just…

— Zadie Smith

Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that…

— Zadie Smith

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination:…

— Zadie Smith

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world…

— Zadie Smith

I'm just interested in women's friendships generally. It always seems to me, and this is just my pet theory, that women are…

— Zadie Smith

Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it…

— Zadie Smith

I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty.…

— Zadie Smith

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

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on…

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all…

— Zadie Smith

People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and…

— Zadie Smith

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because…

— Zadie Smith

I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing…

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's…

— 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