Zadie Smith
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.Collection: Character
The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Girl
She had that thing most people don't have - curiosity. She might not have always got the right answers, but she wanted to ask the questions. It's very hard if you are interested in ideas and all that, ideas and the philosophies of the past, it's very hard to find someone around here to really talk to. That's the tragedy of the thing really I mean, when you think about it. Certainly I can't find anyone around here to talk to anymore. And for a woman it's even harder you see. They can feel very trapped - because of the patriarchy. I do feel everyone needs to have these little chats now and then.Collection: Philosophy
Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.Collection: School
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.Collection: Writing
You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.Collection: Want
Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.Collection: Age
The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.Collection: Country
This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Writing
The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.Collection: Matter
It was a kiss from the past.Collection: Kissing
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.Collection: Salt
When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.Collection: War
... 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.Collection: Pain
It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.Collection: Baby
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.Collection: Lying
Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.Collection: Crazy
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Book
You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires – there is something sociopathic in that ambition.Collection: Strong
It’s difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.Collection: Book
I like books that don’t give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.Collection: Book
World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: ‘How can I do it?’Collection: Firsts
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That’s no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.Collection: Stories
I don’t keep any copies of my books in the house – they go to my mum’s flat. I don’t like them around.Collection: Book
As far as I’m concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.Collection: Book