'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition. Zadie Smith More Quotes by Zadie Smith More Quotes From Zadie Smith He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away. Zadie Smith lastswould-befirsts She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead. Zadie Smith girlfeels 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 shoesairhome I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame. Zadie Smith ambitionwritingbook Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express. Zadie Smith lastscrazypeople It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing. Zadie Smith mountainoddsmatter 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 choicescaringartist It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Zadie Smith hooverbagseasier No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language. Zadie Smith tangledsoullying Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything. Zadie Smith fashionableschool You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me. Zadie Smith want When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. Zadie Smith writingbelievelying But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. Zadie Smith perfectlyingpast You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages. Zadie Smith insightfuldifferentreal It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. Zadie Smith feelingswritingthinking Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'? Zadie Smith wishpeoplethinking You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal. Zadie Smith illegalfeelsmean Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied. Zadie Smith sadnesswritinghands The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport. Zadie Smith passportsmencountry 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 namescharacterpast
