Zadie Smith Quotes

My support system is simple - people and time. The miracle of other people in your life.

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.

We know how to be doctors, nurses, lawyers. We know how to be tweeters. We know how to be everything. But how do you just be people? How do you be present with one another? How do you be honest with one another? How do you be compassionate towards one another, forgiving towards one another? We know what to do. We don't know what to be, how to be.

What people really want, no matter who they are, is someone to listen to them. ... people have a lot on their minds, however trivial, and if you're simply willing to sit there like a sack of dirt and let them yammer, they will tell it to you.

When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.

A poet can't afford to be aloof. The tools of his trade are the people he bumps up against.

Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you're not acting, you're doing monologues.

I like to get up in the morning and see people.

There was other stuff, too, like how something can be so much more than the parts it took to make it, and why people need things around them that lift them above their lives and make them feel the miracle of living.

The miracle of being able to pay attention to other people in your life, and the miracle of being in time, and to continue being in time.

It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over.

I just feel like I'm in the world right now. There have been times when I haven't felt in the world, when I haven't cared whether I was going to be here or not, so my relationship with being on the earth was probably not as intense. And right now, there's an intensity - I want to be here.

Every person you look at, you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

Most people when they're walking are thinking about where they have to go and what they have to do. But that removes us from happiness.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

What's the meaning of life? Other people.

Friendship is a sacred possession. As air, water and sunshine to flowers, trees and verdure, so smiles, sympathy and love of friends to the daily life of man. To live, laugh, love one's friends, and be loved by them is to bask in the sunshine of life.

I am most alive when I let myself be touched by the fingers of life.

I guess the biggest world difference you can make is in people's relations to their own emotions, 'cause emotions rule so much of our daily life, and I think that's where we work.

I just take every day is a miracle and I'm really glad that I'm still working and that people are not sick of me, even though even I'm sick of me a little bit.

Anything having to do with what is happening inside people has political significance to me. That is why I like the term "holistic politics."

Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.

We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.