« All All Quotes · Zadie Smith's Page
All Quotes by Zadie Smith
- Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave…
- I remember so clearly, in the early days, if I had to do a piece of press, they'd phone for me and say, 'Oh, we're…
- I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people…
- Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
- And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all…
- Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to…
- All tastes are expressions of belief.
- Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
- All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
- Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
- If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
- Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
- All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I…
- I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
- I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM…
- When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have…
- Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a…
- This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day…
- Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
- A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash…
- ...despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the…
- It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or…
- Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase "at the end of the day"--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of…
- But sometimes it's like you just meet someone and you just know that you're totally connected, and this person is, like, your brother - or…
- It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if…
More Ways to Read All Quotes by Zadie Smith
More All Quotes
- Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. — Hannah Arendt
- No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has… — Hannah Arendt
- The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are… — Hannah Arendt
- The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to… — Hannah Arendt
- Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and… — Hannah Arendt
- We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for… — Hannah Arendt
- I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is greater or… — Pietro Aretino
- We must all make peace so that we can all live in peace. — Jean-Bertrand Aristide
- The spirit of Ubuntu, that once led Haiti to emerge as the first independent black nation in 1804, helped Venezuela, Colombia and… — Jean-Bertrand Aristide
- As we all know, many people remain buried under tons of rubble and debris, waiting to be rescued. When we think of… — Jean-Bertrand Aristide
- Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life. — Aristophanes
- A friend to all is a friend to none. — Aristotle