Want Quotes by Zadie Smith

14 Want quotes by Zadie Smith

Smith’s prose always lands with a witty, observant edge, and here she turns that lens on longing. Though brief, the fourteen entries provide a thoughtful starter for anyone curious about how the everyday yearning feels through her literary eye.

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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.

Zadie Smith

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Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.

Zadie Smith

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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith

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I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.

Zadie Smith

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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.

Zadie Smith

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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think…

Zadie Smith

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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second…

Zadie Smith

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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the…

Zadie Smith

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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…

Zadie Smith

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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a…

Zadie Smith

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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of…

Zadie Smith

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These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your…

Zadie Smith

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I remember so clearly, in the early days, if I had to do a piece of press, they'd phone for me and…

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…

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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.

Zadie Smith

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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.

Zadie Smith

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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…

Zadie Smith

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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…

Zadie Smith

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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…

Zadie Smith

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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…

Zadie Smith

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