Quote

It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
House
Newspapers
Women
Bodies
Home
Seemed
Body
Shoes
Every
Hatred
Seeped
Way
Brought
Draught
People
Air
Breathed
Control
Feminism

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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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... 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.
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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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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.
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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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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.
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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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