Quote

He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.

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
Heart
Mind
Always

More quotes by Zadie Smith

Image
Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
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 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
Image
Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
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
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
Image
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
Zadie Smith
Image
I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
Zadie Smith
Image
There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
Zadie Smith
Image
...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Zadie Smith
Image
When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
Zadie Smith
Image
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
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
I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
Zadie Smith
Image
Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
Zadie Smith
Image
... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
Zadie Smith
Image
One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
Zadie Smith
Image
[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
Zadie Smith
Image
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
Zadie Smith
Image
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