606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

I lost many literary battles the day I read ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God.’ I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting.

You say you want to talk, But you don’t. You stonewall me.

A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.” “For.

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

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

And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

Writing is my way of expressing – and thereby eliminating – all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people.