Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith (born October 27, 1975) is a British novelist. Her fiction is mainly set in London.

Quotes

Most literary prizes are only nominally about literature. They are really about brand consolidation for beer companies, phone companies, coffee companies and even frozen food companies.
- From a blog entry, as cited in "Zadie Smith sinks teeth into book awards", The Sunday Times (10 February 2008)

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.

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

The thinnest covering of luck was on him like fresh dew. While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes shit happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie.

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

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

Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair that when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee's mother.

But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.

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.

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

Because this is the other thing about immigrants: they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

His death is like the soft down on the back of your hand, passing unnoticed in the firmest of handshakes, though the slightest breeze makes every damn one of the tiny hairs stand on end.

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
- Unspecified edition, p. 424.

A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.
- Unspecified edition, p. 155.

It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love.
- Unspecified edition, p. 54.

You don't have favorites among your children but you do have allies.
- Unspecified edition, p. 167.

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.
- Unspecified edition, p. 225.

In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
- Unspecified edition, p. 398.

But to me, an exercise in style is not a superficial matter – our lives are also an exercise in style.
- "Zadie Smith on NW – Guardian book club", The Guardian (1 August 2013).

[Q:] What moves you most in a literary work?
[A:] Ingenuity, honesty, perversity, bravery and — I must admit — natural talent. I feel the same wonder at a brilliant debut as I do watching Simone Biles doing her back flips.
- From an interview, as cited in "Zadie Smith: By the Book", The New York Times (17 November 2016)

[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.
- From an interview, as cited in "Zadie Smith: By the Book", The New York Times (17 November 2016)

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas—it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone.
- "Shibboleth", The New Yorker (5 May 2024)

So we have to be a bit more, I mean, military about it, like plan.
- Penguin Books 2013, p. 25.

You always wanted to make it clear you weren't like the rest of us. You're still doing it.
- Penguin Books 2013, p. 278.

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Zadie Smith