Zadie Smith Quotes

In England, we once had an insulting name for such people: trimmers. In the mid-1600s, a trimmer was any politician who attempted to straddle the reviled middle ground between Cavalier and Roundhead,...

If these are ‘talents’ – the ability to sing, or to quickly comprehend and reproduce musical notation – what kind of a thing is ‘talent’? A commodity? A gift? A prize? A reward? For what?

Was it wrong to hope to be happy?

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...

This new delicacy, this suggestions of mortal time working on her just as it works on everybody, spoke to me more loudly than any of the old accusations of daughterly neglect ever had.

You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million times over, and rang the doorbell. Past te...

I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions—black music, white music—that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined.

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.

I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing—loads of Indian people. To which you want to reply, Have you read the new Franze...

I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people’s homes, shaking their hands, accepting their fo...

Although entrapment in this case was only another word for love.

Yes, sometimes it’s the strangers that sustain you.

Am so angry at you right now.

I don't remember the song she sang – I never really liked her songs – but standing in the empty concert hall, listening to her sing without backing music, with no support of any kind, I found that the...

While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don’t experience your self as natural or inevitable—as so many other people seem to do—and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with cer...

I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.

When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn’t anticipated, she was offended by it—hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black...

The feeling I had of moving into somebody else’s broken ambition.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition...