Quotes from Zadie Smith

Each novel you read (never mind the novels you write) will give you some theory of which attitude is best to strike at which moment, and—if you experience enough of them—will provide you, at the very least, with a wide repertoire of possible attitudes. But out in the field, experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks or ellipses in which to catch you breath…it just keeps coming at you. 7

Everybody has a talent, in some form. There isn't anyone on earth who doesn't have something of value to offer.

A referendum magnifies the worst aspects of an already imperfect system—democracy—channeling a dazzlingly wide variety of issues through a very narrow gate. It has

Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area—that nobody asked you to carve—and you do something. 20

Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry - we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street.

He left the room silently, and it was not quite clear whether it was the beginning of a row or not. Probably he would decide later, depending on whether there was a practical advantage to be had in discord.

Then they act and do things accordingly.

It struck Natalie that she was no longer crying or shaking, and that dread was the hardest emotion in the world to hold on to for more than a moment.

Extreme inequality fractures communities, and after a while the cracks gape so wide the whole edifice comes tumbling down.

she made you feel that just being in this moment, doing this thing, was the most important and marvellous possibility for you.

She loves to make a fuss, but she is rarely very attached to the fuss she makes.

But here I fear I am becoming nostalgic. I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery: this idea of personhood is certainly changing, perhaps has already changed. Because I find I agree with Zuckerberg: selves evolve.

Il romanzo e' una strada a due sensi dove la fatica che si richiede a entrambe le parti alla fine risulta uguale. Leggere, se lo si fa come si deve, e' difficile tanto quanto scrivere.

We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be.

To believe in blackness solely as a negative binary in a prejudicial racialized structure, and to further believe that this binary is and will forever be the essential, eternal, and primary organizing category of human life, is a pessimist's right but an activist's indulgence. Meanwhile, there is work to be done (xxxiv).

and a bottom which was the Platonic ideal of all English bottomry.

And it's 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.

Marcia would love this—sometimes people see visions of her in the churchyard. Marcia's always having visions. Usually of white Madonnas, though, with blond hair and nice blouses from M & S. . . .

But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over.

Sometimes it is when we stop trying to understand or interrogate apparently 'absurd' phenomena - like the category of the 'new' in art- that we become more open to them.

And even before he said it, he wondered why he had to, why he felt so malevolent this evening.

Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 0627 hours on January 1, 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate facedown on the steering wheel, hoping judgement would not be too heavy upon him.

Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

Marilyn Monroe was pretty far along that curve, as close as one can come to dancing while still walking. In her classic 1953 movie Niagara she takes a legendary walk away from the camera, hips swinging—roiling—in a mode long since memorialized by catwalk models, drag queens, prima donnas, freaks and queers, street punks of all persuasions.