Quotes from Zadie Smith

Ryan was convinced of the ageing fifties motto 'Live fast, die young', and, though his scooter didn't do more than 22 m.p.h. downhill...

And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass.

Actually creating an animal just so it can die -- it's like being God! I mean personally I'm a Hindu, yeah? I'm not religious or nothing, but you know, I believe in the sanctity of life, yeah? And these people, like, program the mouse, plot its every move, yeah, when it's going to have kids, when it's going to die. It's just unnatural .

many learned things can be said about the Venus of Urbino but if you don't open your eyes and recognize her first and foremost as an erotic object how can you claim that you've seen her at all?

Sometimes it is right to submit to love, and wrong to resist affection. Sometimes it is wrong to resist disease and right to submit to the inevitable. And vice versa. 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.

They were the kind of soldiers instructed in brutality only...We were the weak and they were the strong, and whatever force is meant to mediate between the weak and the strong was not present, not on the ferry, not in the country.

A feminist who had always been supported by men—first my father and now the Noted Activist—and who, though she continually harangued me about the "nobility of labor," had never, as far as I knew, actually been gainfully employed.

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

yes, with the mothers she had to make a little more effort, drowning them in language until they understood how out of their depth they were and the thin stream of their objections was completely subsumed by the quick-running currents of my mother's talk.

Despite the Hoover tube that lay on the passenger seat pumping from the exhaust pipe into his lungs, luck was with him that morning.

That is a common mistake. The truth does not depend on what you read.

People are not poor because they've made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they're poor.

in the subtle way of the best bullies Judy and Aimee strove to freeze me out of all important decisions while simultaneously ensuring that nothing they said or did could be explicitly interpreted as punishment or retribution.

The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: it's a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected — compared to, say, the relationship between music and prose — maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it. But for me the two forms are close to each other: I feel dance has something to tell me about what I do.

Oh my God — Fern — please! Stop talking like that! I don't want your heart! I don't want to be responsible for anybody else's heart. For anybody else's anything!' He looked confused: 'A peculiar idea. Once you're alive in this world, you're responsible.

it's a good friend who wakes a friend from her dream

Yes, you could make something ornamental. That's your freedom! Take it! Who knows? You might be the next Augusta Savage!" I

Even if you fear it you're curious to see it.

It's a delusional painter who finishes a canvas at two o'clock and expects radical societal transformation by four. Even when artists write manifestos, they are (hopefully) aware that their exigent tone is, finally, borrowed, only echoing in mimicking the urgency of the guerrilla's demands, or the activist's protest, rather than truly enacting. The people sometimes demand change.

because white novelists are not white novelists but simply "novelists," and white characters are not white characters but simply "human," and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book.

As a rule of social etiquette, when confronted with a pixelated screen of a dozen people, all of them inquiring, somewhat half-heartedly, as to "how you are," it is appropriate to make the expected, decent and accurate claim that you are fine and privileged, lucky compared to so many others, inconvenienced, yes, melancholy often, but not suffering.

within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anyone's baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind between friends and equals, bracketing conversation, like a shelf of books between bookends.

This iswhat divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love

within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anyone's baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind that occurs between friends and equals, bracketing conversation, like a shelf of books between bookends.