Zadie Smith Quotes

She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance.

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, ev...

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister.

But I haven’t described Dream City. I’ll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicit...

I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.

Millat was half sure that he was possibly maybe going to do something or not that would be correct and very silly and fine and un-good.

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

Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

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

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.

As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.

Like millions of British people, we paid our taxes in the hope that they would be used to establish shared institutions from which all might benefit equally.

The happy ending is never universal. Someone is always left behind.

She wore her sexuality with an older woman’s ease, and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to...

They were touched by the same inheritance.

Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.

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

The window logs Kilburn’s skyline. Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never come here. Here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling li...

Maybe I have thought intellect more important than faith. And now it seems this final temptation has been put in front of me.

But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a so...