Zadie Smith Quotes - Page 2

People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.

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.

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.

All tastes are expressions of belief.

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.

Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.

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.

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?

We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.

Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.

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.

Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.

Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.