606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

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.

I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.

Without the balancing setting of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

- Why is it that everyone from your school is a criminal crackhead?- Why's everyone from yours a Tory minister?

... [C]haracter occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly, too.

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 song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?

Don’t romanticize your vocation. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.

There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with.