Quote

Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.

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
Make
Fashionable
Join
Schools
Sure
Read
Thought
School
Everything
Lubricant

More quotes by 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
Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
Zadie Smith
Image
She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
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
Image
The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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
You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
Zadie Smith
Image
I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
Zadie Smith
Image
No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack
Zadie Smith
Image
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
Image
[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
Zadie Smith
Image
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Zadie Smith
Image
Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
Zadie Smith
Image
The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
Zadie Smith
Image
The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
Zadie Smith
Image
I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
Zadie Smith
Image
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.
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
It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
Zadie Smith
Image
Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamental
Zadie Smith