"But sometimes it's like you just meet someone and you just know that you're totally connected, and this person is, like, your brother - or your sister. Even if they don't, like, recognize it, you feel it. And in a lot of ways it don't matter if they do or they don't see that for what it is - all you can do is put the feeling out there. That's your duty. Then you just wait and see what comes back to you. That's the deal."
Quote collection
Zadie Smith quotes (page 6 of 12)
226 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time."
"Any woman who counts on her face is a fool."
"In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution."
"Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people."
"Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else."
"... 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."
"Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is."
"'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition."
"Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead."
"You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me."
"Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as I do, and might be happy to tag along with me on this search for clarity, for precision. I love that aspect of writing. Nothing makes me happier than to hear a reader say: that’s just what I’ve always felt, but you said it clearly."
"Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure."
"Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything."
"Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?"
"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."
"Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable."
"She loved you in the morning because the day was new."
"In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time."
"When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion."