Zadie Smith Quotes

Above all, Hurston is essential universal reading because she is neither self-conscious nor restricted. She was raised in the real Eatonville, Florida, an all-black town; this unique experience went s...

And I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn’s famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discre...

And drunk men take dares like they take breaths.

And now I found I couldn't stay small, my eyes stayed closed but my voice lifted, and kept lifting, I got louder and louder, I did not feel I had control of it, exactly, it was something I'd released...

Blimey, thought Kelvin, what an eye-to-face ratio. When you want to say something delicate, you don't want that eye-to-face ration staring up at you. Big eyes, like a child's or a baby seal's; the phy...

Bong country is beautiful. Lush green forest, a sweet breeze. There are pygmy hippopotamuses here and monkeys; a sense of Liberia’s possibilities. Rich in natural resources, cool in the hills, hot on...

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

But what does soulful even mean? The dictionary has it this way: expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling. The culturally black meaning adds several more shades of color. Fi...

Cigarettes took them to medals, which took them to guns, which took them to radios, which took them to jeeps. By midnight, Samad had won three jeeps, seven guns, fourteen medals, the land attached to...

I am from the Kilburn branch of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, said Hifan proudly. Irie inhaled. Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, repeated Millat, impre...

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy’s screwy—cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.

I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?  •

I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.

I wanted to love and to be loved.

In place of negative falsification, we have nurtured, in the past thirty years, a new fetishization. Black female protagonists are now unerringly strong and soulful; they are sexually voracious and un...

In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first twenty pages in p...

It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees.

It seems to me, said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. I...

So shut it. Go on. Try it. Silence. Ah.’ She reached into the air as if trying to touch the quiet she had created. ‘Isn’t that something? Did you know this is how other families are? They’re quiet. As...