Quotes from Zadie Smith

but to create a real feeling—made

Maybe I have thought intellect more important than faith. And now it seems this final temptation has been put in front of me.

And now I found I couldn't stay small, my eyes stayed closed but my voice lifted, and kept lifting, I got louder and louder, I did not feel I had control of it, exactly, it was something I'd released that now rose up and away and escaped my reach.

It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees.

All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn't leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn't add some permanent treasure to the world, isn't worth doing… This is my "theory", and I maintain it's sentimental - at all events it isn't Flaubert's. How can he fag himself to write "Un Coeur Simple"?

Neither my readers nor I are in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory, but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and *reimagined* if it is to survive.

Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew to understand this and exploit it fully.

They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.  Ã¢â'¬Â¢ Ã¢â'¬Â¢ Ã¢â'¬Â¢

The Noted Activist

In that huge game of musical chairs, I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.

Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble, he said, interrupting me, and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It's possible that it's like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the--what do you call this in English?--skin--film. The thin layer on a bubble.

This is what I understood by it: that for Astaire the person in the film was not especially connected with him.

mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case.

Since that moment one form of crisis has collided with another, and I am no more Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book.

This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from the people you no longer love.

Do others have to lose so we can win?

I felt like some old diary she'd found in a drawer: a reminder of a more innocent and foolish time in her life.

If these are 'talents' – the ability to sing, or to quickly comprehend and reproduce musical notation – what kind of a thing is 'talent'? A commodity? A gift? A prize? A reward? For what?

Archie's marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home and finding they don't fit. For the sake of appearances, he put up with them

Writing is routinely described as creative —this has never struck me as a correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb(I imagine, I've never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control.

And she had not paid a high price. Only love. Just love. And whatever Corinthians might say, love is not such a hard thing to forfeit, not if you've never really felt it. She did not love Archie, but had made up her mind, from that first moment on the steps, to devote herself to him if he would take her away.

In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first twenty pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

It was his fourth trip to the attic in so many days, ferrying out the odds and ends of a marriage to his new flat, and the Hoover was amongst the very last items he reclaimed – one of the most broken things, most ugly things, the things you demand out of sheer bloody-mindedness because you have lost the house. This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love

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, centre stage, for all to see