606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.

No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.” “I.

He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.

War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate.

My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end – we are not our parents and they are not us – my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years... whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face.

The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.

I don’t keep any copies of my books in the house – they go to my mum’s flat. I don’t like them around.

It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers – women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance.