Zadie Smith Quotes

I think it's a deeper issue on the lack of communication in our culture in general. It's not abnormal to see a family out to dinner and every person is on their phone instead of communicating with each other and that's pretty sad.

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

Isolation is a self-defeating dream.

Just as a puppy can be more of a challenge than a gift, so too can the holidays.

In Asia, it's customary to get together with your entire extended family on a regular basis, and it's all rife with politics.

I always love the soapy conflicts between somebody's family of origin and their new family - 'Do I have Thanksgiving at my husband's parents' house, or at my parents' house?'

Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.

I don't really have a social life.

The only thing I liked about Christmas as a kid was the gifts; otherwise, it just seemed like a stressful time.

I don't interact with people much.

Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness.

It's not exactly calm at Christmas. It's a bit like the Simpsons appearing in a pasta advert - lots of bickering, crazy pets, and plenty of tomato sauce!

So many people dread Thanksgiving because they find it traumatic or uncomfortable. My suggestion is to come with a couple of great questions for the table.

The holidays are only overwhelming because it's crunch time. It's like everyone trying to get last-minute things in before the New Year starts.

My December is typically one big, sweaty 'wintry mix' blur, not a punch-laden, heartwarming mixer.

Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal - be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever - human solitude will increase in direct proportion.

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.

People were really staying away from me. And that's kind of when I split up with all my best friends at school - they were going, "Something's happened to her, she's totally weird" - and found my new friends, who were Beatles fans.

I can't stand when I walk into a room and everyone's not talking to each other and just on their phones.

I'm that crazy-ass drunk uncle that nobody wants to invite to the holidays and birthdays.

I wasn't good company, that was true, and people avoided me, but that was all right. I was too busy dreaming.

There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas.

And So This Is Christmas; And What Have We Done? Another Year Over; A New One Just Begun; And So Happy Christmas; I Hope You Have Fun; The Near And The Dear Ones; The Old And The Young.

In real life, holidays are extremely stressful. They're the best of times and worst of times because you have got people trying to get along with people that you don't always get along with.