Quotes from Zadie Smith

Beggars cannot be choosers.

she believed in her own good timing, in timing itself, as a mystical force, a form of fate, operating at the global and cosmic level as much as at the personal.

To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark. Azide Smith, How to be Both

It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.

When my little group get together, if we disagree about something, we can sort it out. Example: Mohona Hossain hates Divargiit Singh. Hates all his movies. Hates him with a passion. She likes that other fool with the eyelashes like a lady! But we compromise. Never once have I burned a single video of hers.

There's never any knowing—how am I to put it?—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever. —E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

It was the season of sex, yes, but it was also, in all the vital ways, without sex itself—and isn't that one useful definition of a happy girlhood? I didn't know or appreciate this aspect of my luck until well into adulthood, when I began to find, in more cases than I would have guessed, that among my women friends, irrespective of background, their own childhood sex seasons had been exploited and destroyed by the misdeeds of uncles and fathers, cousins, friends, strangers.

things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth. Our

What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth.

I couldn't afford to be offended.

Without the balancing setting of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

To think of a hate crime as the most uniquely heinous of crimes seems to lend it, in my mind, an undeserved aura of power. I'd rather something else. The police are investigating this crime as an acute abjection. The police are investigating this as a crime pitiful as it is appalling, pathetic as it is monstrous.

When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English Civil War, of French wines—I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?

The stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure.

So I might say to her: look, the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes—and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.

Those are my bougainvillea—I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing.

It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies – it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

But dying is no easy trick. And suicide can't be put on a list of Things To Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick. It is the decision not to do, to un-do; a kiss blown at oblivion. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It is for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men.

She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.

I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.

People find themselves applauding a national health service that their own government criminally underfunded and neglected these past ten years. People thank God for 'essential' workers they once considered lowly, who not so long ago they despised for wanting fifteen bucks an hour.

Most e-mails sent in the mid-nineties tended to be long and letter-like: they began and ended with traditional greetings—the ones we'd all previously used on paper—and they were keen to describe the surrounding scene, as if the new medium had made of everybody a writer. ("I'm typing this just by the window, looking out to blue-gray sea, where three gulls are diving into the water.")

Since that moment, one form of crisis has collided with another, and I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book. But I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.