It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.'

— Zadie Smith

It's like that quote: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' The choice between a duty or a principle, you know?

— Zadie Smith

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

— Zadie Smith

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

— Zadie Smith

It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual spring fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets (because the pretty red-haired music teacher asks you to) and win a bottle of whiskey (all school raffles are fixed), and, before you know where you are, you're turning up at the weekly school council meetings, organizing concerts, discussing plans for a new music department, donating funds for the rejuvenation of the water fountains—you're implicated in the school, you're involved in it. Sooner or later you stop dropping your children at the school gates. You start following them in.

— Zadie Smith

I want to stay still and to keep moving. I want this life and another.

— Zadie Smith

Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?

— Zadie Smith

Keisha Blake, whose celebrated will and focus did not leave her much room for angst, watched her friend ascend to the top deck in her new panda-eyed makeup and had a Mavis quart d'here, wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.

— Zadie Smith

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 the 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.

— Zadie Smith

More silence; children's silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

— Zadie Smith