Zadie Smith Quotes

[Q:] What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
[A:] the writers that meant most to me: Alice Walker, Roald Dahl, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Noel Streatfeild, Andrew Salkey, L. Maud Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott. Toni Morrison because of The Black Book, which she edited — and I read, at a very delicate age, 9 or 10. But C. S. Lewis above all.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

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

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love.

… dressed all in yellow spreading warmth and the promise of sex.

His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.

In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.

The more blessed she felt on earth, the more rarely she turned to heaven.

… and catholics give out forgiveness at the same time politicians give out promises and whores give out.

As a reader, I want to claim fellowship with "good writing" without limits; to be able to say that Hurston is my sister and Baldwin is my brother, and so is Kafka my brother, and Nabokov, and Woolf my sister, and Eliot and Ozick. Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.

You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, 'Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.' Now how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll—then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.

He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire. The kind of talk that only increases it.