Zadie Smith

The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.

Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives.

Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.

The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.

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.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Full stories are as rare as honesty.

These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.

It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy

You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase "at the end of the day"--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals.

She loved you in the morning because the day was new.