Quotes from Zadie Smith

All tastes are expressions of belief.

Well, you can't make old friends.

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

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

You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.

Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them.

In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship and Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

When in the presence of a child, get on the floor.

Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating, your conception of reality.

And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts;... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.

Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other's pockets... one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to becoming uninvolved.

But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

I always tell my students: A style is a means of insisting on something. A line of Sontag's.

Once they were the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her of the numbers, in case she forgets.

Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old.

The planet is finished with us, at this point -

I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.... I should be loving sculpture! But I have not gone deeply into sculpture. Instead, having been utterly insensitive to sculpture, I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.

It's just the problem with those things, and what i've learnt is this: they're meant to be a shortcut to the ultimate... thing, the plane, or whatever you want to say it like, yeah? It's meant to be: here's your thirty quid or whatever, take me to higher consciousness, please. And it don't work that way, bro. You don't get the full benefit. You've got to work your way up that tree, meaning that that is an allegory which is saying: you can't just fly up to the branches. You get me?

The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate.

The idea of forming people out of grammatical clauses seems so fantastical at the start that you hide your terror in a smokescreen of elaborate sentence making, as if character can be drawn forcibly out of the curlicues of certain adjectives piled ruthlessly on top of one another. In fact, character occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly too.

Leah watches Natalie stride over to her beautiful kitchen with her beautiful child. Everything behind those French doors is full and meaningful. The gestures, the glances, the conversations that can't be heard. How do you get to be so full? And so full of only meaningful things?