Quotes from Zadie Smith

I'm a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.)

We will never be perfect: that is our limitation.

One strong man and one weak is a colony, Sapper Jones," said Samad.

Finally, it was time to go. At the doorway he said, as if it had just occurred to him: I don't understand how you can live here, and be an artist, among all this social noise and all of these people.

Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses—a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame—will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.

certainly don't write as a public service. But I am aware, at least as a reader, that remarkable acts of art-making—bold, perverse, unbeholden, free—have had the side effect of changing the weather in a country, in a people, at a certain historical moment, and finally in me, conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.

But it's hard, when you're at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others.

It was during this time that Archie learned the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him all his life.

The clarity disturbed me. "She

Oh, sister - good news - I'm getting married! I hugged her but felt the familiar smile fasten itself on my face, the same one I wore in London and New York in the face of similar news, and I experienced the same acute sense of betrayal. I was ashamed to feel that way but couldn't help it, a piece of my heart closed against her.

He had no lost thoughts. Last thoughts are for bourgeois Russian deathbeds, in comfortable townhouses, where false friends and colleagues take tea in the next room and ponder what vacancies and opportunities your death might afford them.

Well, maybe I use the wrong word in English. I mean that for Lamin the future is as certain as the past.

Don't give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth!

In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

My late twenties had passed in a weird state of timelessness, and I think now that not everyone could have fallen into a life like that, that I must have been somehow primed for it.

Those who read Middlemarch in that way will find little in Their Eyes Were Watching God to please them. It's about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another.

I said, See what you've done there is you've transformed an act of the perpetrator into a characteristic of the target. You've turned one person's action into another person's being. I said, You don't say to a witch: the reason they're dunking you is because you're a witch. You say, the reason they're dunking you is these motherfuckers believe in witchcraft! Their whole society is based on it!

I do think art can and often does offer models of behavior, or at least suggests possibilities of behavior, but I dislike the aspirational tone of 'role model.' Roth's gift with Portnoy was large precisely because it had no aspirational element and no precise directions. Like any good gift, the less strings we find attached to it the better. The offer was not: You, too, can be like Portnoy. The offer was: Portnoy exists! Be as you please.

Everybody's got their tribe. Whose tribe are you in anyway?

it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance

Brett had proved once again that whenever a young Brett is born in these United States, born with a dream, that dream can truly come true. Yes, sir, if your baby Brett really puts his mind to it -- if he believes, if he has faith, if he is a he, and if he is called Brett -- he can do whatever it is he puts his mind to, and that goes double for all you Troys, Kips, Tripps, Bucks and Chads.

Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, it's an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world —and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand— than by those surrounded by loved ones.

a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees.

in fact the Mail's campaign is a chilling lesson in how a superficial manipulation of liberal identity politics can be used to silence a genuinely protesting voice, one that is trying to speak for us all.