606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting.

It’s a question of what love gives you the right to do.

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist’s literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy – it’s always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

Nobody can cast themselves out.

Great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They’d met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.

Yes, sometimes it’s the strangers that sustain you.

He is a black man. He is often thought of as a nothing, a cipher. But he has layers upon layers upon layers.

When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English Civil War, of French wines – I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?

Libraries are not failing “because they are libraries.” Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.