Zadie Smith Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?”
-- Zadie Smith

#Dream #New Year #Phones
“When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.”
-- Zadie Smith

#People #Looks #Use
“Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Writing #Space #People
“I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Moving #Writing #People
“Time is how you spend your love.”
-- Zadie Smith
“I'm just interested in women's friendships generally. It always seems to me, and this is just my pet theory, that women are kind of at the sharp end of capitalism one way or another. Mainly because they buy everything. In a practical sense, women buy most things. They're always comparing - to friends, to famous people, to other people. An obsessive act of comparison.”
-- Zadie Smith

#People #Pet #Way
“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Future #Past #Perfect
“A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Good Friend #America #People
“Donâ€™t romanticise your â€˜vocationâ€™. You can either write good sentences or you canâ€™t. There is no â€˜writerâ€™s lifestyleâ€™. All that matters is what you leave on the page.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Writing #Pages #Matter
“The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Men #Mind #Way
“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Life #Two #Different
“I was brought up with the sense that I was absolutely no different from my brothers. I went to college thinking I was absolutely no different from the men in college. But that's not true. I'm fundamentally different. The problem was not being able to understand difference and equality at the same time. It's something that we can't seem to comprehend. You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. It's a mistake.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Brother #Mistake #College
“Don't confuse honours with achievement.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Achievement #Honour
“Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Skins #Should #Infection
“She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Women #Knowing #Awkward
“Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Connections #Consciousness #Reason
“Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Reader
“I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Sole #Dictionary
“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 is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Sweet #Grandmother #People
“Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Âinternet.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Computer #Internet
“Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Writing #Enemy #Trying
“And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Character #Past #Names
“Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Dark #People #Needs
“You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Differences #States #Sameness
“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Character #Data #Language
“I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Selfish
“An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply”
-- Zadie Smith

#Thinking #Essentials
“Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Sadness #Writing #Hands
“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.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Believe #Water #Our Love
“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”
-- Zadie Smith

#Love #Lying #African American

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