Quote

I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.

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
Feels
Pain
Lincoln
Way
Another
Tendency
Things
Problem
Tendencies
Like
Littles
Beloved
World
Little
Suppose
Wells
Dying
Well
Boys
Feel
Natural
Abraham

More quotes by Zadie Smith

Image
Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
Zadie Smith
Image
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
Image
We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
Zadie Smith
Image
I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
Zadie Smith
Image
It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
Zadie Smith
Image
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
Zadie Smith
Image
For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
Zadie Smith
Image
World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
Zadie Smith
Image
Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
Zadie Smith
Image
To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.
Zadie Smith
Image
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
Image
Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
Zadie Smith
Image
All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
Image
Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
Zadie Smith
Image
English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
Zadie Smith
Image
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.
Zadie Smith
Image
She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
Zadie Smith
Image
The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
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
Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
Zadie Smith