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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Lady
Ill
Believed
Didn
Matter
More quotes by Zadie Smith
English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
Zadie Smith
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
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
You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
Zadie Smith
You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
Zadie Smith
The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
Zadie Smith
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
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
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
Zadie Smith
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
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.
Zadie Smith
English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
Zadie Smith
The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
Zadie Smith
The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.
Zadie Smith
This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
Zadie Smith
It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
Zadie Smith
It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
Zadie Smith
There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
Zadie Smith
I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
Zadie Smith
Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
Zadie Smith
