606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

As far as I’m concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

To think of a hate crime as the most uniquely heinous of crimes seems to lend it, in my mind, an undeserved aura of power. I’d rather something else. The police are investigating this crime as an acute abjection. The police are investigating this as a crime pitiful as it is appalling, pathetic as it is monstrous.

And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere.

Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That’s no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

A minute later, the young Turk and Howard parted on frosty terms, not much warmed by Howard’s twenty-pence tip, the only extra change he had in his pocket. It is on journeys like this – where one is so horribly misunderstood – that you find yourself longing for home, that place where you are entirely understood, for better or for worse.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don’t experience your self as “natural” or “inevitable” – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages. Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.

It’s gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.