Quotes from Zadie Smith

Once you almost said—to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring—you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.

grass can be seen, although it is important not to

It is the most ridiculous country in the world, Bangladesh. It is God's idea of a really good wheeze, his stab at black comedy.

Here's the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth. Condemned cliques become halcyon "movements" annoying young men, august geniuses.

Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.

Mnóstwo zjawisk, które dziÅ› okreÅ›lamy mianem syndromów, miaÅ'o wtedy prostsze nazwy. Czasy byÅ'y prostsze. To wÅ'aÅ›nie dlatego ludzie mówiÄ… o nich stare, dobre czasy.

When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgement. 'Whatever

The shit is not the shit, he repeated solemnly, the pigeon is the shit.

Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And

People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive

Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always open.

Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.

Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me. Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radio waves, and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one.

You have to be somebody," Lanier writes, "before you can share yourself." But to Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.

I don't see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don't see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can't afford one." Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly. "Children can be a kind of wealth," he said.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.

She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world's sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.

I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?

It was like tag, but a girl was never "It," only boys were "It," girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top.

Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, center stage, for all to see.

Still starving themselves, still reading women's magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can't be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister.

As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.

No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.