Quotes About Zadie

It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.

People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.

We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted.

13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.

I'm serious. I don't know how you work like that. My school shit is better organized, and I'm not in the business of World Domination.

My rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done.

I always tell my students: A style is a means of insisting on something. A line of Sontag's.

A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.

the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity.

But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.

You're next. It's the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings.

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

Kiki turned to her husband with a thesis for a face, of which only Howard could know every line and reference.

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

Our external tubular heating system, painted in garish primary colors, looked like a poor man's Pompidou.

I always tell my students: a style is a means of insisting on something.

L]ook, of course I know you and your family have beliefs,' began Howard uneasily, as if 'beliefs' were a kind of condition, like oral herpes.

The shit is not the shit (this was Mo's mantra), the pigeon is the shit.