Zadie Smith

“I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.”

“A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road - you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.”

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

“My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.”

“A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road - you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.”

“You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.”

“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.”

“Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.”

“She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time for anything else.”

“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.”

“My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.”

“In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.”

“Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.”

“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.”

“Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.”

“The more blessed she felt on earth, the more rarely she turned to heaven.”

“His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out.”

“The thinnest covering of luck was on him like fresh dew. While he slipped in and out of consciousness , the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes shit happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie.”

“This is what divorce is: Taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.”

“Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dot's enthusiast's wet dream.”

“..and the devil won another easy hand in God's poker game.”

“… dressed all in yellow spreading warmth and the promise of sex.”

“… and catholics give out forgiveness at the same time politicians give out promises and whores give out.”

“Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair that when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee's mother.”

“A past tense, future perfect kind of night.”

“But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.”

“He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire. The kind of talk that only increases it.”

“Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.”

“Because this is the other thing about immigrants: they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.”

“His death is like the soft down on the back of your hand, passing unnoticed in the firmest of handshakes, though the slightest breeze makes every damn one of the tiny hairs stand on end.”

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

“A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.”

“It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love.”

“He traced the genealogy of the feeling”

“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.”

“In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.”

“Time is not what it is but how it is felt...”