Quote

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

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
Becomes
Language
Individual
Character
Friendships
Human
Shrinks
Everything
Reduced
Humans
Sensibility
Like
Data

More quotes by 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
And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
Zadie Smith
Image
It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
Zadie Smith
Image
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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
I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Zadie Smith
Image
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
Zadie Smith
Image
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.
Zadie Smith
Image
He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
Zadie Smith
Image
For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
Zadie Smith
Image
Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
Zadie Smith
Image
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
Zadie Smith
Image
Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
Zadie Smith
Image
I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
Zadie Smith
Image
Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
Zadie Smith
Image
Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
Zadie Smith
Image
I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
Zadie Smith
Image
Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
Zadie Smith
Image
You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
Zadie Smith
Image
'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith