A Quote by 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
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?
The Alzheimer's Association in the United States, founded by Jerome Stone, they found me because they had heard rumours that my mom was diagnosed. Jerry said, 'We're a small family group, and we would like to know if you'd like to join us and to spread the word about this disease.' I said, 'Absolutely.'
I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.
If you were there behind every family's closed doors, everyone's a little wacko. Chances are that your family is no weirder than the next family or than the other girl at school's family. Everyone can be quirky at times, and I embrace that, personally.
The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.
If I believed everything everyone had ever told me about my family I'd be a sight more miserable than I am now
I probably would like to do more than I do, because I love working, but I can't work more than I work because I have to do some facetime with the family, and the work that I do is just all-encompassing.
I would be too selfish if I said everyone should see my movies more than once. To say that would mean I'm just marketing my work!
At the end of the day, I know that I would rather be alone and occasionally lonely and unhappy than in a miserable marriage and lonely and unhappy all the time. I don't mind being single. In fact, I like it.
I was really kind of miserable with myself personally and all of the things that you can be creatively, until someone said - and I don't know what about it made it click at this specific time - but they said, "You're not 18 anymore, and you're not writing songs in your old bedroom. It's work. You should get up every day and set a perimeter of time and start compartmentalizing your life."
Because what if I got to know you and you turned out to be just like they said? What if you weren’t the person I hoped you were? That, more than anything, would have hurt the most.
I was over at Alison's [McGhee], I think we were playing Scrabble. I remember we were both complaining - yeah, we sound like whiners - about how hard writing is, and how we didn't have a story to work on. Alison said, 'Why don't we work on writing something together,' and I said, 'Eh, I don't know if I could work that way.' She said, 'Well, just show up here and we'll see,' and I said, 'Well, what would it be about?' She said, 'Duh, it'd be about a tall girl and a short girl.' So I agreed to come and try it for a day.
I don't know that person anymore, that guy in '86, '87. I don't know that guy no more. I don't have no affinity for that guy no more. I have no affinity for the guy who said, 'I am the greatest fighter God produced.' I have no affinity for the guy who said he would try to push his [opponent's] nose bone up into his brain. I just don't know that guy. I don't know who he is. I don't know where he came from. I don't have no kind of connection with him no more.
I had promised myself when I first got started that if I got to the point my life where I started feeling 'Gee, I'd rather be at home than at work', and that started happening more often than not, that it would be time to leave. I'd wake up some days and go "Oh, I don't even know if I want to go face this anymore". I would, I would go do it, I'm a dutiful kind of person and not afraid of work.
In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, "The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting" attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.
I don't know how many modern families watch 'Modern Family,' but then one of the points of 'Modern Family' is that it's hard to tell what a modern family is anymore, let alone what it does.
My family realized I was going to do birth work and then music; they were like, 'What's a doula? This is not what you were meant to do!' And I was like, 'Everyone thinks they can only do one thing.'
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