Quote

The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.

Zadie Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Lack
Action
Doe
Alternatives
Illegal

More quotes by Zadie Smith

Image
Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.
Zadie Smith
Image
And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
Zadie Smith
Image
I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
Zadie Smith
Image
But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
Zadie Smith
Image
It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
Zadie Smith
Image
When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
Zadie Smith
Image
This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
Zadie Smith
Image
Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
Zadie Smith
Image
'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
Image
Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
Zadie Smith
Image
I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
Zadie Smith
Image
People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
Zadie Smith
Image
An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
Zadie Smith
Image
It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
Zadie Smith
Image
When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
Zadie Smith
Image
Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
Zadie Smith
Image
In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
Zadie Smith
Image
Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
Zadie Smith
Image
People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
Zadie Smith
Image
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
Zadie Smith