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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Littles
Little
Concession
Always
Concessions
Time
Whisper
People
Begging
Received
Began
Sun
More quotes by 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
The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
Zadie Smith
You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
Zadie Smith
[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
Zadie Smith
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.
Zadie Smith
You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith
Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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
He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
Zadie Smith
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
Zadie Smith
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
A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
Zadie Smith
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
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
For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
Zadie Smith
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Zadie Smith
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
A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
Zadie Smith
What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.
Zadie Smith
