606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.

Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?

Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships, Language. Sensibility.

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

It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.