Zadie Smith Quotes

My books have done extremely well, I know. But I don't honestly feel much different from when I began to write. I still think we have a long way to go. I suppose my name means more in Nigeria today than it did five years ago. But I feel the job that literature should do in our community has not even started. It's not yet part of the life of the nation. We are still at the beginning. It's a big beginning, because now we are catching the next generation in the schools. When I was their age, I had nothing to read that had any relevance to my own environment.

Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.

What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

When you read something, and especially when you're reading compellingly great, that becomes part of your identity, at least while you're reading it. You become changed by reading it.

I'll tell you sort of an odd story: My music taste changed on 9/11. And it's very strange. I actually intellectually find this very curious. But on 9/11, I didn't like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me.

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment but a way to act.

Hope is like a path in the countryside. Originally, there is nothing - but as people walk this way again and again, a path appears.

You gotta make a change. Its time for us as a people to start making some changes, lets change the way we eat, lets change the way we live, and lets change the way we treat each other. You see the old way wasn't working so its on us, to do what we gotta do to survive.

I have consistently loved books that I've read when I've been sick in bed.

I know that it is not enough to be remembered for books and theories. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in people's lives.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?

Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK, but you can change it.

We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations.

Where the women go, the culture goes.

Christopher Kennedy Lawford's new book Recover to Live will be a force with the power to educate as well as motivate transformational personal change. Recover to Live may alter the way broader society looks at the disease of addiction and those who are suffering from it.

I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.

People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.

You were born with the power to change others. You change people by the way you treat them. That is what changes the human heart.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.

Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.

I am not so naïve as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world. Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.

There was no special event that made me decide. I had collected some photos and the idea was in the back of my mind for a long time. It was growing and growing, so finally I said, 'I must paint this.' I come from East Germany and am not a Marxist, so of course at the time I had no sympathy for the ideas, or for the ideology that these people represented. I couldn't understand, but I was still impressed. Like everyone, I was touched. It was an exceptional moment for Germany.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.