Quote

In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Problem
Calling
Live
Fool
Wells
Writer
Without
Problems
Well
Stuff
Britain
Writing
Running
Envy
Work
Someone
Complete
Also
Competition

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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, Don't you worry about being called names? retorted, Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
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Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.
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I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
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We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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