Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's a curious, wanting thing.
Even ashes are a part of your freedom.
The bad blood rose in me, just like wine.
I barely knew I had skin before I met you.
life is crap but, every day is an experience
All I can do is write about whatever grabs me.
I do love the past but wouldnt want to live in it.
Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?
I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.
There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.
I wouldnt mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.
I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.
I used to write at home, but it didn't ever occur to me to be a writer.
Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?
..this feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin.
Weep all the artful tears you like. You shall never make my hard heart the softer.
I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels.
My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.
My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.
I never expected my books to do even as well as they have. I still feel grateful for it, every single day.
What does it say?" I said, when I had. She said, "It is filled with all the words for how I want you...Look.
My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.
I used to hate flying. I would sit there, rigid, convinced that if I relaxed, the plane would drop out of the sky.
It was a great childhood. We weren't especially wealthy or anything, but I felt I had a kind of safety and freedom.
Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun.
Your twisting is done--you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?
I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don't get to see them often, and they're a great little form, like a short story.
I knew Id always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, Well, Id rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one.
I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.
I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.
I suppose I really seemed mad, then; but it was only through the awfulness of having said nothing but the truth, and being thought to be deluded.
.. now i begin to feel a longing so great, so sharp, i fear it will never be assuaged. i think it will mount, and mount, and make me mad, or kill me.
For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?
Being in love, you know... it's not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can't just go out and get another to replace her.
The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side.
I was mad about the theatre growing up, really mad. We had a local theatre, the Torch, and I used to usher there. I would see the shows over and over again.
I was encouraged to be imaginative and read, and it was a great childhood for a budding writer because I had the time and the freedom to go into a world of my own.
I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.
We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.
She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.
With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.
And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.
It was heavy, and I staggered when I lifted it; but it was strangely satifying to have a real burden upon my shoulders – a kind of counterweight to my terrible heaviness of heart.
People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.
I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat.
Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.
I knew that I couldn't lie beside her, without wanting to touch her. I couldn't have felt her breath come upon my mouth, without wanting to kiss her. And I couldn't have kissed her, without wanting to save her.
When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.
Your heart-as you call it-and hers are alike, after all: they are like mine, like everyone's. They resemble nothing so much as those meters you will find on gas-pipes: they only perk up and start pumping when you drop coins in.
Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether its terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little.