Zadie Smith Quotes

You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.

Because white novelists are not white novelists but simply novelists, and white characters are not white characters but simply human, and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of a...

For a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him.

It’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you wan...

Many learned things can be said about the Venus of Urbino but if you don’t open your eyes and recognize her first and foremost as an erotic object how can you claim that you’ve seen her at all?

Though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other.

…) hrůza se ze všech emocí, co jich na světě je, nejvíc vzpírá tomu, aby si ji člověk dokázal udržet déle než okamžik.

At any time of the day, corduroy is a highly stressful fabric. Rent collectors wear it. Tax collectors, too. History teachers add leather elbow patches.

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...

A tap runs fast the first time you switch it on.

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to an...

And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything i...

Between propriety and joy choose joy.

But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain. One

But first a description: Clara Bowden was beautiful in all senses except maybe, by virtue of being black, the classical. Clara Bowden was magnificently tall, black as ebony and crushed sable, with hai...

But first the endgames. Because it seems that no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docki...

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

Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels w...

Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 0627 hours on January 1, 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate fac...

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories. Outside